Officer nets third arrest in sting operation

DIAMOND, Mo. -- For a male police officer, Jim Murray makes a pretty convincing 13-year-old girl.

Three times in the past six months, men who believed they had conversed with an adolescent girl in an Internet chat room traveled to Newton County to meet her -- only to be arrested and charged with various sex crimes.

In each case, the young girl was really Murray, a member of the police department in Diamond, a small town located just east of Joplin.

The latest arrest occurred Friday when a 37-year-old resident of Grand Rapids, Mich., arrived in Diamond, said Newton County assistant prosecutor Bill Dobbs.

During Internet conversations with Murray that began in mid-September, the man had arranged to meet the girl in a public place in Diamond on Oct. 18, Dobbs said. The man also had two telephone conversations with a female officer working as a decoy.

"He had asked the 13-year-old to bring along a younger friend," Dobbs said.

Officers who met the man at the prearranged site searched his vehicle and found a laptop computer, an Internet Web cam and numerous compact discs believed to contain images of child pornography, Dobbs said

The man, who investigators believe had been living with a brother in St. Louis, was held over the weekend in the Newton County Jail on charges that included attempted statutory rape, attempted sexual exploitation of a minor and promoting a sexual performance by a child.

Prosecutors' case will turn in part on "what we discover when we have the opportunity to view the items seized in his vehicle."

"It will certainly make a difference if those are images downloaded from sites on the Internet or images he produced himself," Dobbs said.

Dobbs said in a March arrest stemming from a Murray sting, the defendant -- a man from the Kansas City suburb of Blue Springs -- was found to be wanted in Oklahoma on charges of raping a 13-year-old girl.

The second arrest produced by Murray's Internet sleuthing occurred in August, when a Pakistani man living in St. Joseph traveled to Diamond expecting to meet a 13-year-old girl. If convicted of attempted statutory rape and attempted statutory sodomy, the man could be deported to Pakistan.