DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — For the first time, Channel 2 Action News is hearing about years of investigation into a former Roswell city councilman who will spend 20 years in prison for 'grievous' child porn offenses.
Kent Igleheart, 55, pleaded guilty to six federal child pornography charges in January, less than a month after he was indicted.
The original lead investigator in this case told Channel 2 investigative reporter Nicole Carr the feds believed there were somewhere in the range of 100 victims in multiple states.
The case began to unravel in DeKalb County in October 2015. He had carried on a three-year online relationship with a girl starting when she was 14 years old, according to the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office. Igleheart posed as a 17-year-old boy and asked the girl to send him sexually explicit photos, which she did. A federal investigation revealed three other victims.
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"If we hadn't stopped him, it wasn't going to stop. He was going to keep doing this," Sergeant Torrey Kennedy told Carr.
A DeKalb County teenager set the investigation off in 2016.
"She came here to report that the guy was practically stalking her," Kennedy said.
The victim described how she'd met Igleheart on a social media app when she was 13.
"She told about the past relationship that had been going on for the past four years and at that point, we knew we were dealing with a pedophile," he said.
In the exclusive interview, Kennedy, who heads up the DeKalb County Internet Crimes Against Children Unit said the federal investigation cast a wide net across the southeast tracking Igleheart posing as a teenage boy, his age depending on the victim's age, and in the DeKalb girl's case, meeting her for actual sex years later.
Most of the interaction was child porn through digital imaging.
"It was a sexting situation so you show me yours, I'll show you mine type," he said.
Kennedy said nothing about the highly publicized case surprised him.
"There is no boundaries. We've literally probably arrested from every walk of life," he said.
In federal court on Friday, Igleheart said, "I had a great life and the actions I took threw that away."
He'll serve his time in a Massachusetts federal prison, and will be 75 when he's released for a decade of supervised probation as a registered sex offender.