A Cleburne County man on trial for production of child pornography was convicted Tuesday in federal court after a jury deliberated for nearly five hours at the conclusion of five hours of testimony from two witnesses spread out over two days.
Norman Thurber, 59, of Heber Springs, was arrested by Heber Springs police on June 28, 2020, after a 15-year-old girl who had run away from her home in Corpus Christi, Texas, told police in the north Central Arkansas town that she had been brought there by a man named "Norman" who had picked her up two days earlier up the street from her Corpus Christi home. She told police she had met "Norman" a week earlier on an online dating app.
Although first insisting to police she was 18 years old, the girl eventually admitted she was 15. She told police the man took her to a hotel in Texas, then to his home in Heber Springs, and that the two had sex a number of times, during which he produced a number of videos of the two of them on his cellphone.
A Heber Springs Police Department arrest affidavit said police traced the man's phone number provided by the girl back to Thurber. She described his tattoos to police and provided them with the layout of his home.
In December 2020, Thurber was federally indicted by a grand jury in Little Rock on six counts of production of child pornography, which under federal sentencing statutes, carries a prison term of 15 to 30 years on each count.
In court Tuesday, the prosecution team -- Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kristin Bryant and John Ray White -- played six videos that were the basis of the six child pornography production counts against Thurber for the jury of seven men and five women depicting sex acts between the girl and Thurber.
Daniel Turner, an FBI special agent who assisted Heber Springs police with the investigation, testified that the contents of one of Thurber's cellphones were downloaded using a digital investigative tool and that messages recovered from the phone matched up with message comparisons on A.H.'s phone.
Turner said that the victim was listed in one of Thurber's two cellphones as "allyhoe" and in the other as "dogsledallyhoe," and in messages to the victim on June 25, 2020, he said he estimated that he would drive the 700 miles from his home to hers in "11 to 12 hours." Within 12 hours, Turner said, Thurber had arrived to pick A.H. up, then took her to a motel in Corpus Christi and the two drove back to Heber Springs the following day.
Then, on June 27, a Saturday, Turner said that Thurber produced six videos between 7:02 a.m. and 10:21 a.m. depicting various sex acts between himself and A.H.
Of the sixth video, Turner described a scene depicted on the 1 minute 43 second video.
Thurber's defense team -- Cara Boyd Connors and Tamera Deaver -- repeatedly denounced the prosecution's case as a case of government overreach and an intrusion into the sexual activities of consenting adults while insisting that prosecutors had failed to prove any of the elements that would indicate a crime had been committed.
"Would you agree that there's nothing in those videos to indicate that A.H. was anything other than a willing participant?" asked Deaver, which drew an immediate objection from Bryant that was overruled by U.S. District Judge Brian Miller.
"I wouldn't agree with you 100% on that, no," Turner said. "I witnessed discomfort in a couple of occasions."
"Would you agree with me that that's rather the nature of BDSM [bondage & discipline sadomasochism]?" Deaver asked.
"I don't know that it's the nature of it for both parties, no," Turner replied.
Connors attacked the prosecution's case on a number of areas including the government's risky strategy of not placing the victim on the stand.
"We don't know how old A.H. is because she isn't here to testify," Connors said. "The overarching theme that I can't seem to escape from in this case is that here we have the government who has all of the resources of the FBI, the Heber Springs Police Department, the Department of Youth Services, the Department of Child Services, Texas public safety department, and they cannot seem to verify A.H.'s age."
Connors said there was no record of any 911 calls, no missing person reports, no reports of a runaway, and that nothing about A.H. suggested her to be a minor, that she appeared to be "a fully developed female" engaging in consensual sex.
"What Mr. Thurber does in his bedroom, I don't know and I don't care," she said. "And the government shouldn't either."
Connors also disputed that A.H. was actually a victim, saying she appeared to be a willing participant.
"She didn't look like she was in pain or discomfort," Connors said. "She looked like she enjoyed it, quite frankly."
The big question hovering over the trial, she said, the question of A.H.'s age, was never fully answered.
"They could have easily put her on the stand but they chose not to."
Bryant contended that the age of the victim had been well-documented, including with a certified copy of her birth certificate from the state of Texas, saying the fact it was obtained a week before the trial did not challenge its authenticity.
"Just because I request my birth certificate today doesn't mean I was born today," she said. "It doesn't change when I was born."
The decision not to put A.H. on the witness stand, Bryant said, was out of concern for her and an abundance of other evidence. She said the degradation portrayed in the videos would only be magnified by forcing the victim, who she said is still a minor, to take the stand.
"Why would we do that?" Bryant asked. "Why would we make her sit up there and look at him in the face and talk about what he did to her?"
Her voice shaking with rage, Bryant then asked, "Why would we do that when we don't have to?"
Following the six guilty verdicts, Miller polled the jury, confirming that the verdicts were unanimous. After thanking and dismissing the jury he explained to Thurber that sentencing will be set following completion of a pre-sentencing report by the U.S. Probation Office.