Feds: NJ man had fantasies about child cannibalism
Nov 21, 2012, 9:26 PM
Associated Press
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) – A man charged with luring an underage boy for a sexual encounter two years ago made numerous online postings expressing fantasies of child cannibalism, federal authorities said Wednesday in announcing new charges against him.
Robert Mucha, 56, already was jailed on a child pornography possession charge from July. On Wednesday, the U.S. attorney’s office added another child pornography count and a count of enticing a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity. The enticing count carries a minimum 10-year prison sentence and a maximum life sentence upon conviction.
Mucha, of Newton, a town in the northwestern part of the state, made a brief appearance in U.S. District Court on Wednesday. He didn’t enter a plea and remained held without bail. The federal public defender’s office, which represents him, didn’t promptly return a message seeking comment.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Bruck said during the hearing that investigators reviewed 30,000 lines of online chat room conversations in which Mucha expressed his sexual fantasies of child cannibalism.
“They are unspeakably horrific,” Bruck told U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Hammer.
In one conversation, Mucha received from an unnamed person a digital image depicting a naked pre-pubescent boy hanging from a wooden pole digitally superimposed over a photograph of a campfire.
“oh man, love that 1st one,” Mucha wrote about the image, according to a criminal complaint.
Investigators said that after Mucha’s arrest in July, when images of child pornography were found during a search of his home, he admitted fantasizing about abducting, cooking and eating children.
He also admitted deriving sexual gratification from physical contact with teenage boys and watching teenage boys showering during his 30s when he taught band class in the towns of Lakewood and Belleville, the complaint said. It wasn’t immediately known where those classes were held or if they were under the auspices of local school districts.
At the time of Mucha’s arrest, he was working as a volunteer emergency medical technician in Andover, a few miles from Newton. A phone number for an emergency squad listed on Andover Township’s website wasn’t taking messages Wednesday.
Prosecutors said Mucha cultivated a 15-year-old boy through the boy’s mother and eventually persuaded the boy to visit him at his apartment in Stroudsburg, Pa., in October 2010. While there, prosecutors said, Mucha tried to initiate sexual contact with the boy.
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