LAKELAND, Florida- In many ways, Chris Wilson could have been the boy next door. The son of a lawyer, Wilson grew up in Lakeland, attended public schools, married a local girl and went on to become a small-town police officer. People who met him years ago still remember him fondly, describing him as polite and funny.

But as an adult, Wilson’s story took a dark turn.

His former wife and her family describe him as a bad husband and vindictive liar, who made their lives miserable with false charges and Internet harassment. Police reports show a man implicated in framing another man’s wife for money.

All in all, it fits with the resume of a notorious Internet pornographer, which Wilson now is.

He’s known from Bartow to Baghdad as the operator of a raunchy Web site that features photographs of both sex acts and war violence.

What sets Wilson’s pornographic Web site apart from the thousands of others on the Internet are the gory photographs he says were taken by American troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wilson says soldiers get free access to his Web site in exchange for photos of the remains of suicide bombers or whatever else they care to submit from the war.

News stories about this unusual arrangement drew attention to Wilson, resulting in thousands of additional hits on the Web site. It also drew police attention and an Oct. 7 raid on his Lakeland apartment by Polk County sheriff’s deputies.

Free on $151,000 bail, Wilson, 28, stands charged with 301 obscenity-related charges. Only one of them is a felony.

Wilson declined to comment for this story. His lawyer says he no longer lives in Polk County, but wouldn’t say where he is.

Before the furor over his Web site, Wilson lived a low-key life.

He and his younger sister grew up in South Lakeland in a house where his father, Tom Wilson, still lives. His father, a former assistant state attorney, now works as a lawyer for the Department of Children & Families.

Chris Wilson attended Sikes and Scott Lake elementary schools. He graduated from George Jenkins High School in 1996.

David Lauer, the former principal at Jenkins, remembers Wilson as polite and cordial.

“He never gave me a minute’s trouble,” said Lauer, now assistant superintendent for human resources for the School District. “Chris was a very nice student. He was friendly. He had a good sense of humor.”

Because Wilson was behind in his credits, Lauer said, he was allowed to take some classes in the computer alternative program so he could catch up and get his diploma.

He didn’t play sports or belong to any clubs, other than the Computer Alternative Program Club, Lauer said.

After high school, Wilson enlisted in the Marines. But he didn’t last long there: He was given a hardship discharge during basic training because of a problem with his eyes, according to Wilson’s job application for the Eagle Lake Police Department.

Back in Lakeland, he worked various jobs, serving as an assistant manager at Blockbuster Video, a parking valet at the Lakeland Yacht Club and an Eagle Lake police officer.

Suzanne Sills, a friend of the Wilson family, described Chris as a nice guy, who was loyal and generous to his friends.

Her children grew up with him, she said.

She wrote a glowing reference on his application to become a police officer.

“I have never seen anyone who wants to be in law enforcement as much as Chris,” she said. “I believe he will be an asset to your agency.”

But eight months after joining the Eagle Lake Police Department in January 2002, Wilson sent a polite, regretful letter of resignation.

“At this time, I feel it is in my best interest to move on and peruse other avenues,” Wilson wrote in the August 2002 letter.

“At this point, I’m looking into freelance computer programming, which I feel will suit my need for a challenge.”

The truth, however, was more complicated.

The Eagle Lake Police Department does an extensive background check on all its applicants, but it failed to find out everything about Wilson’s past.

Wilson didn’t help. He left some key information off his application that later came to light, the Eagle Lake police chief told The Ledger.

Police reports from Vero Beach and Lakeland in 1999 show that Wilson admitted trying to frame the estranged wife of a local businessman. Wilson claimed she hit him with her car and then had him kidnapped and beaten up.

Wilson first called police and told them that Dana Green hit him with her car. He had two of his friends tell police they saw it happen.

Wilson told police he was having an affair with Green, who was married to Mulberry businessman John Green, and she wanted him to kill Green.

Wilson said she had him go to Vero Beach, where she was living at the time, to meet her. And when he told her he wouldn’t kill Green, she hit him with her car. Wilson was bruised and battered, the police report said.

Dana Green denied everything, saying she had never met Wilson and did not hit anyone with her car. Despite that, she was arrested, jailed for several days, and charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

Then Wilson’s story fell apart. The car that she allegedly hit him with showed no signs of having hit anyone, according to the Vero Beach police report. Green had witnesses who gave her an alibi for the time she was supposedly running Wilson down in the street.

According to the Vero Beach police report, when confronted, Wilson admitted he had someone beat him up so it would look as if he’d been hit by a car. He said John Green gave him $10,000 in cash to frame his estranged wife.

John Green did not want to discuss the case in detail, but said, “If there ever was a Pinocchio, Chris Wilson is it.”

Green said he never gave Wilson any money and denied he hired Wilson to do anything.

According to Florida Department of Law Enforcement Special Agent Richard Piccininni, Wilson was not prosecuted for filing false police reports because he cooperated in an investigation against John Green.

Piccininni said Green, who was on probation for mail fraud, went back to jail as a result.

Wilson also filed a report in Lakeland about the same time, claiming that two men kidnapped him at gunpoint, beat him up and threatened to harm him if he didn’t drop the charges against Dana Green.

When he was interviewed by Lakeland police, he admitted he made up the story, and stated he was being treated for psychiatric problems and was taking medication for those problems, according to a 1999 Lakeland police report.

“I counseled him about the seriousness of this offense,” Lakeland police Officer David Albares wrote at the conclusion of the report.

Eagle Lake Police Chief J.R. Sullivan said he was not aware of those incidents when he hired Wilson.

After a retired FBI agent told department officials about the incidents, they asked Wilson about them, Sullivan said. Wilson immediately resigned.

There were no indications of problems before that, Sullivan said. “When he was here he seemed up front and did his job the way he was supposed to,” Sullivan said. “He was a `yes sir, no sir’ kind of guy.”

While still working as a police officer, Wilson was running a Web log called Core 39, named for the police academy class he attended at Polk Community College.

A search of www.archive.org, which archives old pages of Web sites, showed that Wilson did not feature adult pornography on the Core 39 Web log while he was working at the Eagle Lake Police Department.

However, in September 2002, the month after he quit the department, Wilson posted the following on his Web site:

“Now please don’t burn my server up with hate mail, but yes, I have gone ahead and decided to stick an adult area here. I have done this for a few reasons. One is this site costs a fortune to run, and I’m trying to offset some costs. The second is there are very few decent adult sites around, in my opinion. So we now have our own adult area. The content that is there is either user submitted or is soft-core images that some friends who sell adult content let me pick out . . . As of now, I have over 1,000 images. They’re not all up yet, but they will be soon. This is only for people who want it. If you don’t want it don’t use it.”

Wilson no longer operates that Web site.

Three months after leaving the Police Department, Wilson married the girl he’d been dating, Trisha Greb. They were married Dec. 28, 2002, according to their marriage certificate.

In an e-mail, Trisha, who is in the Army stationed in Afghanistan, said after Wilson left the Police Department he refused to look for work. He was living with her in military housing in Alaska at the time, and he spent all day playing video games and looking at Internet pornography. He told her that running a pornography Web site was his full-time job, Greb said.

Their relationship deteriorated, and in April 2004 she asked him to leave. Their divorce went through in July 2004.

Wilson also had a rocky relationship with Greb’s parents, apparently from the start.

Her mother, Corinne Greb, told Wilson not to come to the family’s house because she did not like him dating her daughter.

After Wilson married Trisha Greb, according to Corinne Greb, he made a false report to the Department of Children and Families, claiming that Trisha’s father, Charles Greb, was molesting her younger sister. That investigation was dropped because the allegations were unfounded, Corinne Greb said.

Wilson’s lawyer, Lawrence Walters, acknowledges that Wilson made a report to the DCF, but declined to comment further.

Wilson also posted defamatory information about the Greb family on his Core 39 Web site, Corinne Grebb said. He also posted their Social Security numbers and unpublished telephone numbers, she said.

While they were married, in February 2003, Wilson accused Charles Greb of coming to Wilson’s house with a gun and threatening him, according to a Sheriff’s Office report. Greb was arrested, and his family had to post bail, Corinne Greb said.

When the Sheriff’s Office tried to follow up on the case, according to a report by the State Attorney’s Office, Wilson refused to give a sworn statement about the alleged incident. The case was dropped.

Corinne Greb said Wilson fabricated the incident, and her husband has never owned a gun.

In May 2003, Corinne Greb went to the Polk County Courthouse and requested restraining orders against Wilson, asking that he stop harassing their family and that he remove the defamatory information he had posted about them on his Web site.

The restraining orders were denied, according to court documents, because the petition “does not sufficiently allege that the petitioner is … a victim of at least two incidents of repeat violence.”

In a statement from Wilson’s lawyer, Walters said, “The issues raised by unsworn allegations and police reports from the ’90s are wholly unrelated to the issues surrounding Chris Wilson’s Web site, and subsequent obscenity arrest. We therefore do not believe those subjects to be appropriate for public debate. That being said, it is important to note that Chris Wilson was not arrested, prosecuted, nor convicted for any actions arising out of the subject of the police reports. Chris Wilson has no prior criminal record and maintains his police officer certification, even today.”

After his marriage fell apart, Wilson returned to Lakeland. He created his pornography Web site in January 2004. The Web site has the F-word in its title and domain name.

The site claims to have 229,841 registered users, although it is not clear how many of those are paid subscribers. The site asks people to send in nude pictures of their wives or girlfriends or husbands and boyfriends. Those who send in pictures can get free access to the site. Otherwise, they have to pay $20 for three months of access.

But it wasn’t until about seven or eight months ago that he made the offer to military personnel to give them free access to the Web site in exchange for their war pictures.

Many of the photos simply depict life for soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are pretty images of helicopters flying against the evening sky. There are photos of students in school rooms.

But other pictures are gruesome, featuring mangled bodies, with biting comments posted underneath.

For example, one picture shows the bloody, limbless and headless trunk of a body, posted with the comment “Mess with the best, die with the rest.”

There appear to be dozens of the photos, at least. No one has been able to confirm whether all of them come from Iraq or Afghanistan, but all purport to.

In an earlier story, Wilson told The Ledger that soldiers overseas were trying to pay for access to his site, but their credit cards were being rejected because they were coming from countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

So he posted an offer on his Web site: If soldiers sent him a picture that proved they were in the military and serving overseas, he would give them free access to the paid section of the Web site.

“I figured this would be something I could do to give back to the soldiers,” Wilson said. “It’s a little different, I know.”

Despite Wilson’s arrest on porn charges, the Web site continues operating It’s unclear who is actually running the site.

Wilson’s story has been publicized widely on the Internet.

Blogs have sprung up debating his arrest, some of them soliciting money for his legal bills. Internet commentary ranges from people enraged over the gruesome photographs he posted, saying he deserves to rot in prison, to people incensed over what they perceive as a violation of Wilson’s First Amendment rights.

On Wilson’s site, Wilson has a list of different topics where users can post comments. Since his arrest, he posted a request for people to donate to his legal fund. “Whatever donation you can make via PayPal goes directly to my lawyers for what is going to be a long, drawn-out First Amendment fight,” he says.

Dozens of Wilson’s supporters responded with messages condemning his arrest.

“Let me just say, as a military veteran of the U.S. Navy, that if people don’t want to see stuff from the gory section then they shouldn’t look. I have peeked a time or two, but don’t care to look at that stuff, so I steer clear of it. NOBODY makes people look at this stuff,” a poster named Cowboy2199 wrote.

Wilson, after speaking to media all over the world about his Web site before his arrest, has been ordered by his lawyer not to talk to the press any more.