Richard E. Bighouse's name will also be his residence for the next 20 years and ten months, after he was sentenced September 15 for using stolen identity information to buy and deal in child porn.
Washington County Circuit Judge Timothy Alexander sentenced Bighouse to fifteen months each for ten child porn charges, all to be served consecutively, because the children in images found on computer disks in Bighouse's possession were each different. Alexander also ordered consecutive sentences on 10 of the 13 identity theft sentences, on top of the child porn terms.
Police raided a storage unit Bighouse rented in Beaverton in April, finding computer disks that included child porn featuring children as young as 10 months old and Department of Motor Vehicles disks containing identification information and photographs, not to mention blanks to print Oregon drivers' licenses and blank stock for printing checks.
Bighouse reportedly told police the child porn itself didn't interest him but that he'd acquired it on a disk in a trade. That didn't exactly fly with Alexander.
"You were going to make some profit out of this," the judge was quoted as telling Bighouse during sentencing. "That is worse to me than the sad creatures who sit at home on the Internet and look at this. It is just atrocious."
The 41-year-old was said to be living as a transient when arrested but had information on well over 100 people. One, Daniel Scott, was victimized, according to a published report, by $22,000 in bad checks Bighouse wrote on his name, and nearly landed in jail because Bighouse ran up several traffic offenses using a driver's license with Scott's name and photo on it.
"He basically shut my life down," Daniel Scott told reporters after learning of Bighouse's sentencing. "It's horrendous. I'm still getting stuff in the mail." That stuff, according to a published report, includes letters tied to Bighouse's bad checks in Scott's name to OfficeMax, Best Buy, Les Schwab Tire, and several mail order companies.
