SPANISH FORK — Three weeks after he was arrested for having child pornography, an attorney who used to work for the Child Protection Division of the Utah Attorney General’s Office was arrested again for making child pornography.
Gary Lee Bell, 66, of Spanish Fork, was arrested Tuesday by Utah County sheriff’s deputies. They are looking into 12 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, aggravated sexual abuse of a child, and sodomy on a child.
Bell was arrested in August by detectives from the Utah County sheriff’s Special Victims Unit. They said they found images of child pornography on electronic devices Bell owned. This happened after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told detectives that child pornography was being downloaded.
After getting a search warrant, detectives went to Bell’s house, where they arrested Bell and “took several electronic devices.” Bell was put in jail, where he stayed until a judge let him out on Sept. 6 with the condition that he wear a GPS tracker.
On Tuesday, a sheriff’s detective looked at the information on a micro SD card that belonged to Bell. This was done after a forensic technician gave them the information taken from the devices that were taken from Bell in August. A police booking affidavit says that when the detective looked at the data, he found “a series of nine photos” showing a man hurting a child.
“Detectives think that Bell made these pictures and videos, and that he didn’t just get them from somewhere else,” said Utah County Sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Cannon in a statement.
In the affidavit, the detective said that they recognized things in the background of the images from photos taken by crime scene technicians when the warrant was served on August 24.
According to the affidavit, when the detective looked into it more, he found a video file that showed the abuse and more photos of a child. “I looked at the EXIF data for both photos, which shows what device was used to take the photos and when they were made. Both photos were taken on a Samsung phone with the model number SM-A10201. This is the same phone that was taken from Gary during the warrant service.”
The affidavit said that there are “hundreds” of photos of Bell on the extraction and that the video looks like “full-naked photos” that Bell took of himself.
On Tuesday, Bell was sent back to the Utah County Jail.
“It’s even scarier for anyone who has talked to Mr. Bell to know that, in addition to downloading material made by others, he may also be making similar material, like photos and videos, of people he has sexually abused,” Cannon said.
Bell will be held without bail because a judge said so.
Police said Bell left his job at the Utah Attorney General’s Office, but the office said he quit in 2020 but wouldn’t say why. He worked as a prosecutor in the Child Protection Division, but the office said that he did not bring cases to court.