By the time Carl Hammer retired from the National Institutes of Health in 2017, he was an accomplished research chemist. He had published more than 75 papers and managed a mass spectrometry testing facility.
Last month, the 81-year-old pleaded guilty to what child exploitation experts said is a rapidly growing crime: Using video live streams to direct impoverished children overseas to produce personalized sexual abuse material.
“It’s everywhere. Anywhere you look, you will find it,” said John Tanagho, executive director of the Center to End Online Sexual Exploitation of Children at the International Justice Mission.
Hammer used an iMac desktop from inside his suburban Maryland home, court records said. Investigators built their case on him through phone records, interviews and a live-stream recording they found during which Hammer typed directions to a girl, estimated to be 8 to 11 years old, to reposition her camera as she danced naked in a sexualized manner. “U look so grown up,” he wrote, according to court filings.
Hammer is due back in Montgomery County Circuit Court on Dec. 4 for sentencing. He faces up to four years in prison.
“The cases we know about aren’t the tip of the iceberg, they’re the tip of the tip of the iceberg,” Tanagho said.
Last month in Maryland federal court, William Foster Alger, a 76-year-old mechanic from Hagerstown, was sentenced to 11½ years after admitting he paid a woman in Ecuador to make videos of herself sexually abusing her 7-year-old daughter. The payments, he initially claimed to investigators, were made to help the family, according to court documents.
In another federal case in Maryland, former University Park mayor Joel Biermann, who ran on a “Protecting our Children” platform, has been indicted on six counts of producing child pornography. Federal prosecutors have accused him of commissioning sexually explicit images of Filipino boys, including one photo of a child holding a sign that read, “I love Joel,” according to court filings.
Prosecutors recently alleged that his conduct escalated. The onetime federal contractor traveled to the Philippines, where he sexually abused four prepubescent boys in a hotel room and tried to rape them, prosecutors alleged. He also recorded the abuse, they said. Biermann has pleaded not guilty and denies the allegations against him, said his attorney, Peter Fayne. Biermann remains in custody and no trial date has been set.
Hammer remains under house arrest ahead of his sentencing. When reached by phone, he said, “This has been going on for too long,” and declined to comment further.
His attorney, Justin Eisele, said in court recently that Hammer “accepts full responsibility” for his actions. Eisele noted earlier in court that Hammer had no previous criminal record and said that because he cares for his ailing wife, any time behind bars would unfairly burden her. “Obviously his wife is not happy about this,” Eisele said, “but she needs help.”
The case against Hammer began Dec. 1, 2023, when federal agents from the Homeland Security Investigations division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were sorting through digital records of a Philippines-based child sex trafficker. She had communicated over Skype with “ltqvelosorbitrap,” according to court records.
Broken into three words, “ltqvelosorbitrap” spells out as LTQ Velos Orbitrap, a type of mass spectrometry machine. It’s unclear whether agents made that connection — or needed to, after seeing Hammer’s name in the Skype records. At 6 a.m. on a Tuesday, they arrived at this home.
Until then, Hammer was known to the outside world as an accomplished scientist.
Hammer earned his PhD in biochemistry from Penn State and in 1977 joined the National Institutes of Health, a world leader in biomedical research. He stayed 40 years, according to court records and the NIH, analyzing and identifying chemical samples with mass spectrometers, which are sophisticated machines built around the ionization of molecules and detection of mass-to-charge ratios. Over his career, Hammer helped researchers studying topics ranging from vector-stage parasites to the riboflavin properties of mutant chickens, according to PubMed listings.
“His area of expertise — proteomics — was very cutting edge,” recalled a former colleague, describing how Hammer used high-end techniques to determine protein identity. “He did a lot of work for me, always with a smile. We had long talks about science while waiting for analysis to finish.”
The biochemist agreed to speak freely about a former colleague on the condition of anonymity. “This definitely comes as a shock,” he said. “I never felt anything off or strange with him.”
When Hammer retired, well-wishers congratulated him on research forums, and he responded in kind. “Although I miss the mass spec lab and the tight group of excellent co-workers, retirement is great,” he wrote, saying he was enjoying travel, gardening, an exercise group and spending time with family.
The day federal agents entered his home, Hammer agreed to speak with them. Under questioning, he admitted to directing children to dance naked on live-stream videos, according to court filings. The agents left with his iMac, an iPhone 14 Pro Max and two external hard drives.
On the computer, according to court filings, they found one of the recorded Skype calls that included a small chat window where a man named “Carl” offered written suggestions for camera and lighting angles. Investigators also found more than 100 screenshots from a different video, according to Hammer’s plea hearing.
ICE’s Homeland Security division transferred the case to Maryland State Police, which arrested Hammer on Feb. 26. He spent four nights in jail before release on a $250,000 bond and returning home.
Montgomery prosecutors secured a 12-count indictment related to a single victim and alleged that Hammer had recorded at least one other child. They eventually struck a deal with Hammer for him to plead guilty to one count of soliciting a child to produce child pornography and capped the maximum sentence at four years. Maryland guidelines for his case, while not binding, suggest a range of three months up to the four-year limit, according to court filings.
Montgomery County Assistant State’s Attorney Debbie Feinstein, who runs the special victims unit that prosecuted Hammer, declined to discuss the case ahead of sentencing. Speaking generally, she said that real-time, personalized production of child sexual abuse material is “proliferating exponentially” by offenders who see the videos as a form of control.
“The person is creating, directing and producing it,” she said.
The full scope of the crime is unknown. But money flowing from the United States offers one measure of the demand. During a recent 18-month period, Tanagho said, financial institutions flagged $7.3 million in suspicious payments sent from the U.S. to the Philippines and linked to child exploitation.
Individual transactions can be small, with offenders negotiating prices down to as little as $10, said Marija Manojlovic, executive director of Safe Online, a global fund that supports organizations working to end child exploitation online.
Offenders see live-streaming as lower risk compared to buying already-produced child sexual abuse material, because the latter involves large file transfers that tech companies often detect. Experts such as Manojlovic and Tanagho said the companies need to commit more efforts to preventing the illegal use of live-streaming.
In a statement, Microsoft, which formerly ran Skype — the communications app linked to Hammer in court records — said the company is committed to tackling child sexual exploitation. “We have made significant improvements over time,” the statement said. “We take proactive steps to deter, detect, and disrupt child exploitation in all forms across our services. As of May 5, 2025, Skype has been retired.”
For the children being directed in the live streams, the effects can be devastating. The majority are 12 or younger, Tanagho said. And they often are managed by a parent, older sibling or adult neighbor who keep them working well into the night, because of time differences in the U.S. and Europe.
“The child comes to see the abuser as the benefactor, which deepens confusion and self-blame,” Manojlovic said. “They learn their body is a commodity. Many don’t recognize it as abuse.”
And what offenders seek can grow more extreme, experts said. That includes directing adults on exactly how to sexually assault a child, or traveling overseas to do it themselves, they said.
“What we have seen is that this is an escalating crime,” Tanagho said.
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