Former Wilmette parks employee admitted to regularly seeking, viewing ‘child erotica’ — and then became a park district volunteer

A former Wilmette Park District employee whom police investigated in 2017 for inappropriate online activity involving children has volunteered for the organization on several occasions since then, according to public records and park district officials.

The former employee, who worked in the parks department for more than 40 years, abruptly left the park district in 2017 amid the investigation. Police documentation shows that for years the employee used park district devices to deliberately visit websites that displayed sexually suggestive images of children “likely under the age of 10 years old.”

The employee, however, was neither arrested nor charged with a crime, according to Wilmette Police documents. The viewed images reportedly did not meet state and federal definitions for child pornography. The Record, which confirmed the identity of the employee through public officials and public documents, is choosing not to identify the individual because they were not charged with a crime.

During the police investigation — on Oct. 27, 2017, a day after police interviewed the employee according to public documents — the employee retired effective immediately from the Wilmette Park District. Park officials declined to comment on the employee’s retirement. District spokesperson JP McNamara said in an email that the district “always cooperates with any law enforcement investigation.”

Documents show Executive Director Steve Wilson signed off on the employee’s retirement, and according to Illinoisanswers.org, the former employee receives pension benefits (80% of final salary) through the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund.

Park district emails obtained by The Record show that following retirement the employee continued casual conversations with park employees, including department heads and Wilson, who reportedly collaborated with police on the investigation.

The former employee began volunteering with the district at latest in 2018, when he wrote letters to local children for a holiday program, and last volunteered with the district as recently as the summer of 2024, the district confirmed.

Neither McNamara nor Wilmette Park Board President Kara Kosloskus would comment on the former employee and that individual’s current involvement with the park district.

The investigation

According to police documents obtained by The Record through a public-records request, the Wilmette Park District contacted the Wilmette Police Department in October 2017 regarding a district employee viewing potentially illegal child images on electronic park district devices.

The park district reportedly uncovered the digital activity following the installation of new firewall software that monitored the district’s internal network. The software flagged multiple webpages viewed by the employee, according to the investigation report. Upon review by park district leadership, documents show, the webpages featured “underage females in limited clothing and sexually suggestive poses.”

The ensuing police investigation — which involved a hidden camera to confirm the employee’s activity and identity, documents show — revealed that the employee visited at least 15 suspicious webpages containing nearly nude and sexually charged images of juvenile females, many “likely under the age of 10 years old.”

In the police report, a Wilmette detective referred to the images as “child erotica,” a term he noted that he learned during his training. The detective added that from his experience with “child exploitation cases” the sites “are common amongst users attempting to locate child porn.”

In an interview with police, documents say, the employee admitted to purposefully visiting the sites and viewing underage females in sexually suggestive attire and poses on park district devices. The employee reportedly would for “several years” arrive at his park district office prior to work hours — between 3-6 a.m. — and view the material on a district computer and cellphone.

The employee also reportedly saved “50 to 100” of the images to the park district devices, before eventually deleting them.

The police documents say that the employee admitted to police that they would have viewed “young girls naked” if they could find the images.

The employee also told police they had deleted the images after downloading them; however, documents show that three years later, in 2020, a park district supervisor found a USB drive in the employee’s old office that contained hundreds of images of juvenile females similar to those reviewed in the 2017 police investigation.

Police reportedly asked the employee multiple times about physical contact with children, specifically asking about park district programming. The employee denied ever having physical contact with a child in the community, according to the police report.

The Wilmette Police Department determined — in 2017 and in 2020 — the employee’s engagement with the child photos did not break the law and reach the legal standards for child pornography. Under Illinois law, to be considered child pornography the images in question must be “a lewd exhibition of the unclothed or transparently clothed” private areas of a child.

Former Wilmette Police Chief Kyle Murphy, who left the department in 2024, oversaw the investigation and told The Record that the department consulted with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office via telephone before closing the case.

The state’s attorney’s office had no record of Wilmette’s investigation; however, a spokesperson said that phone reviews with law enforcement occasionally occur, but records are only kept when the state’s attorney’s office officially reviews a case.

The Department of Homeland Security, the report shows, also analyzed the employee’s devices and web activity in coordination with the Wilmette Police Department’s investigation.

“Trust me if there was a criminal offense we could have charged, we would have,” Murphy said. “… The park district, when they learned of this, notified us immediately and we investigated thoroughly, and had we been able to prove a criminal offense we would have.”

Continued involvement

Emails between the former employee and park district officials beginning in 2017 show that the employee has remained involved in park district programming.

In a 2018 email, a parks official thanked a group of volunteers, including the former employee, for “your help writing all the kids back who dropped letters in Santa’s Mailbox.” McNamara, the park district’s spokesperson, confirmed the former employee wrote letters to children as part of the program.

The former employee has also been a regular volunteer at The Wilmette Block Party since its 2022 inception, emails show and district officials confirmed. The employee, according to emails, was the 2023 and 2024 lead for setup of the block party, a large-scale, outdoor and family-friendly event in the village’s downtown area.

It is unclear at which, if any, other programs the former employee volunteered.

Park district officials declined to answer if the police investigation was considered before the employee was allowed to volunteer.

Up until the fall of 2024, the park district did not have an official volunteer policy in place but followed state law when necessary, such as with volunteers for youth athletics, said Wilson, the district’s executive director, in an email to The Record. Wilson wrote that the park district had no official guidelines to bring in volunteers for “one off events” and volunteers at such events are “under staff supervision for the event.”

McNamara told The Record via email that the district recently adopted a volunteer policy that states the district will weigh a volunteer candidate’s qualifications and can deny a potential volunteer for any reason. The new policy also requires a background check for volunteers over 18 years old.

Kosloskus, the Park Board president, said the new volunteer policy was adopted in the late fall of 2024 as part of a larger district effort to formalize several policies. Its development, she said, was not initiated because of any current or former park district volunteer.

Child sexual abuse material

While child pornography is the term defined in legal statutes, organizations from the U.S. Justice Department to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children prefer the term “child sexual abuse material,” or CSAM, to describe any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a child.

According to the NCMEC, the term “child sexual abuse material” is more accurate in its description of the content, which represents “the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.”

“While CSAM is seen and transmitted on computers and through other technology, these images and videos depict actual crimes being committed against children,” explains the NCMEC website.

Not only are the images evidence of crimes against children, but as the files are shared on the internet, the victims suffer another traumatization, according to the NCMEC.

In a 2017 survey of CSAM survivors, two-thirds of respondents said the distribution of their images online impacts them differently than any hands-on abuse, because the online images are permanent.

Tracy Leonard has learned that and more in her role as director of programming and partnerships with Darkness to Light, a nonprofit that focuses on educating adults to prevent child sexual abuse from happening. She said that CSAM is especially harmful to the victim, because of the under-controlled nature of the internet.

“For the child, if they know their picture had been taken and their picture is out there, they have this trauma, like people are looking at them because they’ve seen their image online,” Leonard said. “Every time a photo is reshared, that child is being retraumatized. … It is something a child victim is constantly a part of, as if they were physically abused. It is equal to that.”

With the evolution of technology, the presence of CSAM has surged in the 21st century. The NCMEC’s Child Victim Identification Program has reviewed 425 million CSAM-related images and videos since it began in 2002 and its tipline now receives 1 million messages a month, a majority of them regarding CSAM..

NCMEC is one of many organizations worldwide that supports survivors of CSAM and their families. Team HOPE is an NCMEC program that connects families impacted by CSAM, and offers a variety of support channels to survivors, including Take It Down, a service that helps remove online nude, partially nude and sexually explicit photos of children.

You can also contact internet service providers, such as Google, Snapchat and TikTok, to request the removal of explicit content.

Illinois’ Attorney General’s Office has an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which investigates child exploitation and provides educational opportunities around the topic. To report online child exploitation or child pornography, the task force suggests contacting local law enforcement and emailing Illinois.icactip@ilag.gov (child exploitation) and ReportChildPorn@ilag.gov (child pornography).

The Record is a nonprofit, nonpartisan community newsroom that relies on reader support to fuel its independent local journalism.

Subscribe to The Record to fund responsible news coverage for your community.

Already a subscriber? You can make a tax-deductible donation at any time.