BENTON COUNTY, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — A Decatur man reached a plea agreement and will serve 18 years in prison after being charged with multiple counts involving child pornography.
Raymond Ritchie Miller, 21, entered a guilty plea in Benton County circuit court on March 13. According to court documents, he was arrested on December 8, 2021 and charged with one count of engaging children in sexually explicit conduct for use in visual or print medium and ten counts of distributing, possession, or viewing matter depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child.
A probable cause statement submitted to the court said that the Benton County Cyber Crimes Unit received a cybertip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on September 3, 2021. It said that Google reported an account holder uploading and storing child pornography on August 17, 2021.
Investigators verified Miller’s email address and phone number connected to the account. Google said that 52 files had been uploaded during a two-month period.
A detective from the Benton County Sheriff’s Office executed a search warrant to view the files on September 3, 2021. She confirmed that all 52 images depicted child erotica or child sexual abuse material.
She estimated that the juvenile victims were between the ages of 3-12 years old.
During the execution of the warrant, Google provided investigators with three additional cybertips connected to Miller’s account that had not been assigned to the sheriff’s office. The search of his account found 28,432 web-related artifacts from 27,322 Google searches that the detective called “a small amount of the notable child exploitation related searches” Miller made.
Investigators then determined Miller’s address in Decatur from his phone number. They executed a residential search warrant there on November 2, 2021.
Miller acknowledged that the two Google accounts in question were his, but he told detectives that he had stopped using them “months prior.” He admitted to viewing images of teens but claimed that he had downloaded images of girls that were “mostly eighteen.”
Miller said that “someone could have gotten onto his account,” but he said no when asked if he had given his account information to anyone.
“It could have been people on the other end that was trying to get information,” Miller stated. He also denied committing any hands-on offenses. Further questioning revealed that Miller communicated with teenage girls on social media but “he could not remember their usernames” and he denied asking them for images.
An on-site investigation of Miller’s phone turned up multiple messages between Miller and subjects that identified themselves as 16 years old or younger. One underage girl told him that “he should be in jail for messing with little girls” and she said that “he was a pedophile.”
During a custodial interview conducted on December 8, 2021, at the Benton County Sheriff’s Office, Miller admitted that his “sexual curiosity and interests” began when he was 13 or 14 years old. He also confessed to actively looking for child exploitation pages on social media.
He was arrested following that interview and booked into the Benton County jail.
After the plea agreement was signed, Judge Robin Green signed a county jail order on March 13 that remanded Miller into the custody of the Benton County Sheriff to be transported to the Department of Corrections to begin serving his sentence.
