The problem with porn

     Leahy has never committed a sex crime, but he acknowledges that his addiction had lead him to undertake unlawful behaviors, such as voyeurism and exhibitionism, when he would masturbate in the window of a motel during business trips, peering into neighboring buildings to stare at women and allowing for himself to potentially be seen.

     Leahy had first experienced porn magazines as a child and had occasionally picked them up throughout his teenage and college years.

     "I had a fascination with voyeurism and exhibitionism when I was very young," Leahy explains. "I had even experimented with that and had a lot of fantasy about that but never really seen any material on it. Before the Internet, my diet was pretty steadily made up of Playboys or an occasional Penthouse [where] you didn't see those kinds of scenarios." But when he began working for IBM, he had a whole new influencing factor to increase what he calls his "relationship with the material." As an employee, Leahy had access to a higher speed connection at work than most Internet-capable homes during that time, enabling him a doorway to what was quickly becoming a vast stockpile of images online without the risk of getting caught with explicit material.

     "When I got on the Internet and started finding these voyeurism sites and exhibitionism sites and all these other categories of things that I never even knew existed, it really increased the amount of sexual stimulation that I started to experience," Leahy says. "A person usually has a certain pension for something. For some, it's children — child pornography and offending. For others it may be exposing themselves or exhibitionism or voyeurism, that whole deal. So that's where this really crosses over from being something where you're abusing yourself to something that's abusing others."

     Nick Boffi, a Fairfax County, Va., detective working in the child exploitation units for about five years for a total of 17 combined years with the department, says he has seen similar step-by-step transitions take place with the child enticement cases he has worked over the last few years.

     "Many of my cases start out with just child pornography," Boffi says. "That didn't do it for [the offender] anymore and they moved on to the actual enticement. The reason they're going for the enticement is that they're not getting the thrill of looking at the child porn, they actually want to participate in some sort of act."

     He explains that though he would not lump all cases and all offenders into this category, he's seen a pattern form over years.

     "That's just statistics; that's not saying that yes, 100-percent of the time [a suspect enticing a child online will] have child pornography," Boffi says. "But in order to quench their thirst before actually doing the enticement, they're building up their fantasy by looking at the child pornography. And then they go the next step with the child enticement."

     Leahy says he became dissatisfied with his sex life and began consuming porn regularly at work until eventually, like Bundy mentions, the fantasy was not enough to quench his sexual thirst and Leahy began having extramarital affairs to satisfy his sexual appetite. Leahy's addiction did not drive him to break any laws — his affairs were with consenting adults. But Leahy acknowledges that Bundy's 1989 pornography confessions sound a little too familiar for comfort.

     "You reach a point where the pornography only goes so far, you reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it," Bundy says in the 1989 interview. Like for Bundy, the material acted as a stepping stone into a realm where Leahy says he broke his moral codes; acts like masturbating in a window and having an extramarital affair that he had not thought he was capable of before he built an appetite for through viewing online erotica.