Father James Beighlie, a retired Catholic priest who once served as an associate pastor at Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish in House Springs, has been sentenced to five years in prison for possession of child pornography.
He pleaded guilty in October 2022 to possessing thousands of images and dozens of videos of child porn, along with compiling two PowerPoint documents featuring illicit images, the U.S. District Attorney’s Office reported.
On Tuesday, Jan. 10, U.S. District Judge Matthew T. Schelp sentenced Beighlie to five years. Beighlie also was ordered to pay $4,750 in restitution to one of the victims and $22,000 in special assessments that will go to other victims of crimes involving children, according to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office.
“It’s depressing and sickening to know that people were looking at images and videos of my online sexual abuse when I was a little girl and that they were getting pleasure from it – my abuse,” one of the victims said in a letter to Judge Schelp.
Before his retirement, Beighlie, 72, was a Vincentian priest and an associate pastor at St. Vincent de Paul Parish in St. Louis. Prior to that assignment, he was a chaplain at DePaul Hospital in St. Louis. He also had served on the faculty at St. Thomas Aquinas/Mercy High School in St. Louis and at Vincent Gray Academy in East St. Louis, and he had been an associate pastor at Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish in House Springs, according to the Congregation of the Mission Western Province.
The Catholic church began to investigate Beighlie in May 2021 after staff members at the Congregation of the Mission in St. Louis found nude images on an office printer that were traced back to the priest. The church had the Gadellnet IT firm in St. Louis inspect four desktop computer towers, a laptop, four external hard drives and a smartphone that Beighlie had used, and the firm found a dozen videos depicting children performing sex acts, the report said.
After the discovery, the church’s attorney contacted the FBI, which then launched its own investigation. The FBI reviewed the 10 devices and discovered about 6,000 images of child sexual abuse on one of the computer towers and about 236 images and 40 videos of child sexual abuse on another computer tower, according to the report.
The agents also found the two PowerPoint presentations Beighlie created in June 2009, and one of the presentations included 2,930 slides with images of nude children and the presentation had been updated 87 times. The second presentation included 2,856 slides with images of nude children, and that presentation had been updated 123 times. The first presentation was last updated in September 2015, and the second presentation was last accessed in April 2015, the report said.
“This criminal conduct was part of his daily life,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Colleen Lang, who handled the case.