No Charges for Ex-Priest in Mahtomedi, As No Child Porn Found
By By Mara H. Gottfried
The Washington County attorney's office will not charge a former Hugo priest after investigators determined that pornographic images on his computer hard drive did not involve children. "I concluded there is no criminal evidence" against the Rev. Jonathan Shelley, County Attorney Pete Orput said Wednesday. Shelley's attorney, Paul Engh, said it was "a good day" for the priest. "This case was investigated (by the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis) and favorably resolved in 2004, with the results reported to Father Shelley's parish," Engh said. "Nothing has changed. ... (Shelley) looks forward to a life now free of unfair suspicion." The archdiocese placed Shelley, 52, on leave during the investigation. Engh said he hopes to be assigned to a parish again. The archdiocese did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Police last year began investigating allegations that Shelley kept child pornography on his computer in 2004 when he was a priest in Mahtomedi before serving in Hugo. Shelley denied the allegation. The case was closed Sept. 29 after police determined that computer disks turned over by the archdiocese contained only adult pornography. But police reopened the case a few days later when a Hugo parishioner gave police files that he said he had copied from Shelley's hard drive about 10 years earlier. Asked Wednesday what was on the disks, Orput said, "I don't think I'm at liberty to talk about what was on there. I'm only interested in whether there was criminal evidence, and I said, 'no.' That's my conclusion." In a memo to St. Paul police dated Jan. 22, explaining why Shelley would not be charged, Orput detailed the case as follows: On Sept. 7, 2004, Joe Ternus, a Hugo parishioner whose family once owned the house where Shelley lived, retrieved a computer and hard drive that had belonged to Shelley and was no longer wanted. Ternus wanted to give the computer to his children, "but when he booted it up found what he believed to be objectionable, pornographic material downloaded onto the hard drive," the memo said. Ternus contacted the archdiocese. The Rev. Kevin McDonough, then vicar general, contacted a private investigator and requested he retrieve the hard drive from Ternus. Ternus turned it over Sept. 29, 2004, after he made copies of it. The investigator gave the hard drive to a forensic computer examiner for analysis. On Oct. 15, 2004, the investigator received a report on the examiner's analysis. The investigator picked up the hard drive and two disks the examiner had produced of the hard drive, and gave them to an archdiocese receptionist with the notation "Attention: Father McDonough." "After some time passed and not hearing anything from the archdiocese," Ternus asked McDonough for a meeting. Ternus "was concerned that the matter 'would be swept under the rug,' " the memo said, and McDonough assured him "the matter would be fully investigated." Ternus didn't hear back from the archdiocese. In 2013, Ternus contacted St. Paul police after learning Shelley had moved to a neighboring church. Investigators then reviewed two disks that Ternus had created and one the computer examiner had made, all from 2004. On Oct. 9, police gave the disks to the Minnesota Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC). A forensic examiner sent all 1,303 images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), "which maintains an enormous pictorial and textually identifying database of pornography involving known minors from throughout the world," the memo said. St. Paul police investigators "concluded that they did not believe there were any minors depicted on the images on the disks," according to the memo, and the forensic computer examiner "concluded there were five images where it was unclear whether the images depicted were adults." An assistant Washington County attorney concluded none of the images depicted minors. NCMEC's review "concluded that none of the images were those of known images of child pornography," the memo said. Orput concluded his memo to police: "We have found in our experience that without a NCMEC finding of minors present in the images as well as it being readily apparent, from a common sense point of view, that minors are present in the sexually explicit images, that child pornography prosecutions cannot be brought. That, together with the opinions of the three experienced investigators and experienced prosecutor in this subject matter ratifying NCMEC's finding, it is the conclusion of this office that no child pornography, as defined by Minnesota statute, exists on the disks in question." Contact: mgottfried@pioneerpress.com
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