On April 12, 2012, a postman carrying a package containing two DVDs of child pornography—one titled Curious Boys—walked up to a modest home in Export, Pennsylvania, some 30 minutes east of Pittsburgh, and rang the bell. A forty-something man emerged, signed for the offered package, and retreated back inside. The man was Todd Markley, a former church youth worker who hadn't done much to mask his purchase; indeed, Markley had paid $54.95 for the videos with a personal check and signed his own name, then filled out the order form with preprinted address stickers listing his correct home address. He also hadn't been discriminating about how he obtained his videos. Rather than seeking out vetted sources, Markley had simply responded to an ad from a company called "CVI" that had arrived in the mail.

The ad had been produced by one Brian Bone, which might sound like some sort of pseudonym but which was in fact the name of a US Postal Inspector running an undercover sting operation. Bone had helped bring down an LA distributor of child pornography back in 2006 and, as part of that investigation, had uncovered the company's sales database. On it were a host of names, including Todd Markley's—a repeat customer who had allegedly ordered 21 child pornography videos between 2003-2006. After shutting down the LA company, Bone in 2011 finally turned his attention to reeling in those customers in the company database, provided they still showed interest in obtaining such material. Markley proved an easy fish to hook, requesting a catalog from CVI and soon ordering videos right to his home.

Moments after the "postman" had delivered the package containing those videos—in reality, the whole operation was a pre-planned "controlled delivery"—agents from both the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and the Pittsburgh High Tech Crimes Task Force converged on the home. They swarmed in with a search warrant and went looking in particular for any electronic evidence in the home. Markley didn't offer much resistance, even voluntarily giving investigators the combination to a home safe. Inside the safe, agents found something curious: a hand-written notecard headed "Delete one month of e-mails." The flip side of the card had a section labeled "Saturday Mornings" that included steps like "Delete browsing history and files."

If this was meant as a security protocol to guard against moments like this one, it failed spectacularly; if it had only been meant to make sure that visitors never saw anything unusual on his computer, it seems to have worked well enough. Even Markley's own mother had no idea what her son had allegedly been up to.

Agents also found several thumb drives in the safe. Following an increasingly common protocol, the team did a preliminary review of the drives right there in the house, not waiting for a forensics lab to do a thorough and time-consuming report. Child pornography was immediately apparent on two of the drives, according to investigators, who say that Markley quickly admitted to his ownership of the material. Also in the safe: multiple versions of a suicide note and brochures for NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

After the search, investigators carted away their finds, but they left Markley untouched. Though he was under investigation, though he had accepted delivery of two movies he believed to contain child pornography, and though similar material had been found in his home, he was not under arrest. Yet.

An eye for an eye

One week after his computers had been seized, Markley was at Walmart buying a new machine. He relied on e-mail to keep in touch with people—even those coming after him, such as US Postal Inspector Karen Yoakum, who had been on the warrant team and had spoken with Markley at his home. He wanted to know what was going to happen to him. And as he waited, his mental state deteriorated.

Not that Markley had been in great shape to begin with. As his mother Sandra would later testify, her son's suffering started early in life, as he didn't seem to be progressing through normal stages of development. It wasn't until he was a freshman at Virginia Tech that the cause became clear: a tumor of the pituitary gland, which prevented full sexual development. It was left untreated for so long it largely destroyed the organ before being removed. The list of Markley's eventual health problems was dazzling: severe migraines, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia. A meningioma required brain surgery in 2011. Severe back pain flared up. Neuropathy sent pain through Markley's face so sizzling that he eventually underwent a procedure in Detroit to install a motor cortex stimulator by "removing part of his skull, placing these leads with electrodes on the top lining of his brain, then bringing those leads back out through his skull and—through his skin, and they come out approximately behind his ear and go down." The results of all this suffering had been, his mother said, an anxiety disorder, panic attacks, and a daily need for painkillers like Oxycontin and Vicodin. Markley was also on disability at the time of the raid.

The investigation upped Markley's anxiety throughout April and May; by the end of the month, he didn't believe he could handle the pain and stress any more. According to accounts from investigators and from Markley's mother, Markley made his way to his new computer at some point after midnight on the morning of May 31 and wrote at least two e-mails. One went to his mom, who lived only a few minutes away, and it read: "If I die before dawn and my soul has moved on, there is no loss, only gain, for I will be living free, free from my myriad of pain. Grace and hope God has granted me, living in his glory for eternity. I will soar with the angels. I will sit at God's feet. I will worship Christ Jesus. My joy is complete. Todd."

But only a few minutes earlier, Markley allegedly sent a far less joyful e-mail to Postal Inspector Karen Yoakum—one with the subject line "an eye for an eye." Its opening lines set the tone: "You are a murderer. You killed me, bitch."

In the message, Markley said that he had not looked at the images on the flash drive for "4 or 5 years" and that he had never had "any inappropriate contact with a minor." (An FBI agent later testified that forensic tools showed that some of the images on the drives had been accessed only days before the raid.) He talked about those parents who told him that he was "the best Youth Ministry Director our church has ever had" and how he had counseled "teens who were so stoned, they didn't even know what day it was." He had helped all of those teens, Markley said.

Well, all except one:

An eye for an eye, bitch. Remember the one youth that didn't break his drug habit. He is deep into organized crime now? But he still trusts me, and I trust him. There's a $3,000 bounty on your bitch-ass head. They won't get you right away. They will wait until the police stop watching you, then, boom, bitch, you're dead. I've instructed them to make your death as painful, drawn out and humiliating as possible. You will probably be raped by at least ten guys before they kill you. They will beat the shit out of you, and then they will cut you just enough that you will bleed out slowly. Get your affairs in order, bitch. You fucked up, and soon, you'll be paying for it with your life. No one can protect you or save you now. And until you're dead I will petition God daily to send you to the deepest, damnedest depths of hell, where you will burn with the rest of the damned for eternity. You stupid bitch. You've killed both of us, but your death will be much more painful than mine.

Markley then downed handfuls of pills. He soon passed out.

A sad and disturbing case

But Markley did not die. When his mother awoke in the early morning, unable to sleep longer, she checked her e-mail and found his note. She called Markley's sister and the associate pastor at their church; the three met in the predawn darkness outside Markley's home.

"I had a key, went up, found him in his bed, found—there were three empty pill bottles," his mother later recounted. "I could not arouse him. I shook him. He was still breathing, but it was not normal breathing. He was gasping. I called 911, and the 911 operator kept me on the line, told me how to secure his airway, you know, lower the bed, hold his head back, his chin up until the medics arrived."

Markley was taken to a local hospital, stabilized, and eventually committed to the mental health ward.

His e-mail to Yoakum had, predictably, made his whole situation far worse. The FBI got involved because of the murder/rape threat, and the Bureau obtained a search warrant for Markley's Comcast e-mail account. Less than 24 hours after Yoakum received the threat, the government filed a criminal complaint against Markley for possession of child pornography and for "threatening to murder, intimidate, interfere, or retaliate against a federal official."

At a court hearing in early June, FBI special agent Gregg Frankhouser noted just how horrific that e-mailed threat had been. "My discussions with other law enforcement personnel, some involved in law enforcement over 15 and 20 years, have said they have never read an e-mail as violent as that," he said. The FBI, the Pittsburgh High Tech Crimes Task Force, and the US Postal Inspection Service are currently investigating the threat to see if the person "deep into organized crime" even exists, was contacted, and was paid the $3,000 bounty.

Without that e-mail, and given his clean criminal record, Markley might have spent his time awaiting trial under his parents' supervision, with limited Internet access and electronic monitoring. But when it came time to rule on such a release, the judge returned to the e-mail. "You know, we have an e-mail that's not a one-line idle threat," he said. "It's filled with very specific threats that are very violent and very graphic, and I'm not overlooking the child pornography charge, which is serious in and of itself, but frankly, it's the threat that concerns me more."

Despite his professed sympathy for Markley's physical and mental health issues, the judge ordered Markley detained until trial.

The case has all the technical elements of so many modern investigations—search warrants for e-mail, the on-site triage of electronic evidence, a defendant's use of thumb drives, half-hearted attempts to keep a computer "clean," and the presence of high-tech investigative task forces. But cases built on electronic evidence still have humans behind them and, on a human level, this one is more depressing than most. As the judge put it at the end of Markley's detention hearing, "Well, this a very sad and disturbing case on a number of levels."

With no trial date yet scheduled, Markley remains in custody.