A host of questions remain about child pornography investigations in the Rutland Police Department and the Vermont Police Academy but no one is willing to answer them.

In both investigations, state and city police have referred questions to the state Attorney General's office, which on Friday said they wouldn't be answering any more queries.

"We will not be making any further comments at this time regarding the Rutland Police investigation," Cindy Maguire, criminal division chief at the Attorney General's Office said in a voicemail left Friday morning.

Questions about the Rutland case and the Police Academy case were e-mailed to the Attorney General's office late in the day Friday.

Maguire responded to the questions in an e-mail but again declined to comment.

"As I have indicated to you several times, both of the matters you are inquiring about are open criminal investigations. Given that fact, we have no comment at this time," Maguire wrote.

Police and prosecutors rarely comment on ongoing investigations — although in a rare exception, state police issued a statement last week that said they lacked evidence to prove that city police Sgt. David Schauwecker intentionally downloaded pornography onto a work computer he was using or that it could be proven that the images of young women in some videos seized from his office were girls under the age of 16.

But several of the questions sent to the Attorney General's office on Friday weren't specific to the cases involving Schauwecker in Rutland and David McMullen, a Police Academy trainer who took his life hours after state police executed a search warrant at his home targeted toward suspected child pornography last month.

A handful of the questions the Herald wants the Attorney General's office to answer include:

Is there any connection between the Police Academy investigation and the one at RCPD?

It seems that the search warrant executed at the residence of Dave McMullen in Cornwall is overdue to be returned to Middlebury District Court. The clerk there has no record of the file. Has it been sealed? And if so when and on whose authority?

Does your office agree with the findings released by state police that seem to indicate the child pornography was not intentionally downloaded by the officer? Did the AG's office sanction the release? And if so why try to shoot down the case while it's still under investigation? It seems the AG's office is more concerned with protecting the image of a police officer than trying to stop child porn.

Why not at least try for a search warrant of Sgt. Schauwecker's home computer and related media in the early days of the investigation to find the removable media component referred to in the warrant?

In the last question the "media component" refers to a device, like a computer disk or memory stick, that state police said they were looking for when they applied for a search warrant executed at the Rutland Police Department in September. File names under Schauwecker's user ID on his computer suggested they might show an 11-year-old in a shower or involved in sexual acts, but police did not do other searches for the "media components."

Five months later, in an argument to keep the contents of that search warrant sealed, Assistant Attorney General David Tartter wrote that investigators had drafted additional search warrants to search Schauwecker's home and elsewhere but "at this time continue to attempt to obtain probable cause."

The search warrant in Schauwecker's case was issued by an Orleans County judge and sealed at the request of the Attorney General's office, before it was filed in Rutland District Court. Its existence was also kept secret, including from Rutland County Judge Thomas Zonay, who included a rare footnote in his order to unseal it indicating his displeasure with not knowing what documents were under his jurisdiction.

The search warrant in McMullen's case was executed on Jan. 15. Typically, warrants are available for public scrutiny in less than two weeks. In Schauwecker's case it took one week for the sealed warrant to be filed with the court. State law prescribes that search warrants become a matter of public record once they are executed and returned to the court.

But more than a month later, the clerk of the District Court in Middlebury said he has no record of it. If the warrant was sealed like Schauwecker's was, the clerk would be prohibited from talking about the warrant or acknowledging the court received it.

brent.curtis@rutlandherald.com