Former College Security Chief Sentenced to 8 ½ Years for Child Porn
Covington KY Nov 5 2017 The former campus safety director at a small Kentucky college was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on child porn charges dating back to 2014.
Robert Marshall, 54, pleaded guilty to 36 counts of possession of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor. Marshall will also have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, reports RCNKY.
Marshall worked as the director of public safety at Thomas More College in Crestview Hills starting in 2003. He had been employed by the school since 1999.
Marshall was arrested in January 2016 after police conducted a near two-year investigation.
Thomas More president David Armstrong says the school had no prior knowledge of the investigation until Marshall was arrested.
Authorities were tipped off to the images by his son, Robbie Marshall, who says he confronted his father over the images before reporting him to police.
“It’s pretty much he needed help. I just couldn’t turn my head anymore,” says Robbie.
The Covington Police Department says its investigation took so long because Marshall had installed an image-wiping software on his computer and was in the middle of using it when police arrived.
“Any time that data is wiped from a hard drive, it is increasingly more difficult to retrieve that data, and we had to send it off to be forensically examined and retrieved,” says Covington Police Lieutenant Colonel Brian Steffen.
Police were able to recover 36 child pornography images. Thousands of others images had been erased and could not be recovered.
