Three young men incensed that American porn producer Daniel Weather—suspected of making child porn as well as adult porn—posted online sadomasochistic videos in which they acted have reportedly confessed to beating the 44-year-old producer to death, upon their February 27 arrest.
Bulgarian police said the threesome confessed to the crime, saying they were outraged that Weather broke an apparent promise only to target the videos for home sale in the United States.
Reports in the Bulgarian state press have suggested the former Warsaw Pact country, which has hopes of joining the European Union, has become something of an international adult industry center—including a magnet for Western-based child porn producers who thrive on recruiting "destitute youth and children to perform" in Internet videos and erotic chats.
The three unnamed suspects, ages 17, 21, and 22, reportedly confessed to beating Weather to death with batons, stones, and metal rods, before dumping his body into a rural well. Weather was first reported missing in mid-February, when his Bulgarian girl friend—whose identity has not been disclosed—contacted police.
A fourth accomplice in the crime, said to be 20 years old, is still at large.
At the same time the three arrests in Weather's killing was reported, Bulgarian state radio reported an unidentified American adult company hired over 1,500 young Bulgarian women and 100 men for live erotic chat with overseas clients paying between $2-3 per hour for the chats.
State radio also reportedly broadcast a live telephone interview with a clerk in that company's Sofia office, the clerk telling a female journalist posing as a job applicant that she'd be required to strip before a camera on demand by online viewers. The clerk said the company's activity was legal, but Bulgarian law imposes a penalty on hiring people to produce porn, state radio said.
Weather himself had been under the eye of Bulgarian police and the FBI in a joint operation covering six months, in a bid to track his customers and the funding for his Websites, though few other details of that probe have been released at this writing.
But Bulgarian Interior Ministry Chief Secretary Boyko Borisov told state media Weather was believed to have hired children or teenagers from poor, rural families, by luring them with $34-per-session pay to film them nude and perform sex "out of poverty or curiosity," including one video believed to feature Weather himself with four Bulgarian teen girls.
