San Diegan Arrested in Pornography Case : Suspect Used Candy, Money to Lure Teen to His Apartment Over 2 Years, Police Say

A San Diego man has been arrested on 90 felony counts in a child pornography case. Police said he used candy and money to draw a teen-age girl into his apartment as part of a two-year operation in which he allegedly produced and distributed child pornography, some of which may have been sent commercially to the East Coast.

Colby Watson Flaherty, 66, was taken into custody after police searched his home Friday near the San Diego Sports Arena and found hundreds of photographs depicting a 15-year-old neighbor girl in sexual acts.

Flaherty was being held in County Jail downtown on $407,000 bail. He was booked on suspicion of 20 counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child, 20 counts of sex with a foreign object, 20 counts of oral sex with someone under 18 and 30 counts of employment of a minor for sale or distribution of obscene material.

“That’s an extraordinary number of counts, and all of them are with the same victim for over at least two years,” San Diego police spokesman Bill Robinson said. “He has been developing her over the last two years.

“But we feel there are other victims, too. There were hundreds of photos recovered. And evidence was found that even more pictures may have been mailed to the East Coast, according to receipts and other child pornographic literature found in the apartment.”

Parents Called Police

Robinson said police obtained a search warrant Friday after the 15-year-old girl finally told her parents about her relationship with Flaherty and the parents contacted police.

On Saturday, neighbors described Flaherty as a quiet resident of the old Ocean House apartments in the 3100 block of Kemper Street. They said police spent four hours inside his second-story unit, walking out with boxes of photographs and other materials.

Police said they found a “whole closetful of stuff.”

“Some of it was commercially legal pornography,” said one police investigator, who asked not to be identified. “Some of it was illegal child pornography. And some of it was homemade stuff he was producing.”

Robinson said the girl was a frequent visitor to the Flaherty apartment, drawn there first on the promise of candy, later on the lure of cash gifts.

According to records kept by the apartment managers, Flaherty had worked for 12 years at Caltrans before retiring as an office-services supervisor. He moved into the $350-a-month apartment in 1979, and for the most part he kept to himself.

“He never went out,” manager Debbie Smith said. “He would leave his rent money in the bin, and it would be there when I woke up. He would (come) down in his underwear in the morning to pick up his mail.

“Once, he told me that if I knocked on his door, he wouldn’t answer it because he didn’t let anybody in. He told me if I needed to talk to him, to stand outside and yell my name.

Suspect Seldom Seen

“I thought that was really different. But he said it was because he always walked around naked in his apartment. And he made a point of saying there was no law against that.”

Her husband, Bill Smith, and other tenants said they also seldom saw Flaherty, and that they never saw children or teen-agers coming or going from his apartment.

“He was real quiet,” Bill Smith said. “But when I saw him, he always had a shopping cart with him, full of cans. Always. You never saw him without it.”

Police ask that anyone with additional information about the case call their Child Abuse Unit at 531-2260.