Photos of Abuse Found in a Home’s Walls Lead to Prison Time for Father and Son

A man and his son were sentenced to lengthy prison terms on sexual abuse charges after Polaroid photos from the 1980s and ’90s of children being sexually exploited were found in the walls at a home near Sacramento where the two had lived for over 40 years, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s office said on Tuesday.

The father, Theodore Smith, 90, was sentenced last month to 100 years in prison after he pleaded no contest in Sacramento County Superior Court to 11 counts of committing forcible lewd acts on a child and three counts of lewd acts on a child, the district attorney’s office said in its statement. His son, James Smith, 66, pleaded no contest to two counts of committing lewd acts upon a child and was sentenced to 23 years to life in prison.

The authorities were led to the Smiths in 2021, when a new homeowner was renovating an outbuilding on the property where the Smiths had lived in Orangevale, Calif. Polaroid photos and video tapes fell out of the building’s walls during the renovation, the district attorney’s office said. Hundreds of images, taken from 1985 to 1995, showed anonymous children under the age of 14 being sexually abused by adults, according to the authorities.

Law enforcement officers were able to identify the children — now adults — from the photos, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Facebook in 2021. Eventually, investigators connected the images to Theodore and James Smith.

The father and son had lived in the Orangevale home for more than four decades but had recently moved to Alto, Texas, a rural area in the eastern part of the state about 55 miles outside Tyler, the sheriff’s office said. Once the Smiths were identified as people of interest, their new home in Alto was searched, the sheriff’s office said. Although the statute of limitations prevented charges from being brought against them for materials before 1988, there was enough from after that year to bring criminal charges. The two were arrested in October 2021, the sheriff’s office said.

“The victims were under 5 years old when the abuse began, and it continued for the majority of their first decade in life,” the district attorney’s office said. “The victims never told anyone about the abuse other than their spouses.”

It was not immediately clear how many children were in the images. How the Smiths knew the victims was also not immediately clear.

The Sacramento County Conflict Criminal Defenders Office said that the Smiths did not appear to have a lawyer and efforts to reach them on Wednesday were not immediately successful. Theodore Smith was being held at the Sacramento County Main Jail while James Smith was at the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center, according to inmate records.