Peterson withdraws child sex abuse pleas

Gary Peterson, who pleaded guilty in April to three of 32 counts of sexual abuse of children he was charged with, withdrew his guilty plea at his sentencing Monday.

"There may be a reason this may not proceed to sentencing today," said sate District Judge Daniel Boucher, once he sat down at the bench after having an audience with Peterson's attorneys.

Kaydee Snipes Ruiz, Peterson's attorney, said Peterson's plea was not taken voluntarily and that he was "coerced" into giving it.

Boucher said he was reluctant to allow them to revoke the plea but didn't see how he had a choice.

A motion to withdraw Peterson's guilty plea will need to be filed by Oct. 6 and the state's response to it by Oct. 19.

According to court documents in which Havre police file the report of their investigations, an officer, on June 6, 2013, received information that nude images involving a teenage girl had been located within an office at the Human Resources and Development Center. An employee had found them when looking through a cupboard for software and said they believed the photos were of Peterson girlfriend's daughter.

The girl went to the police station the next day to affirm that she was the one depicted in the photos, and she was 16 at the time and did not know Peterson received them. After an officer spoke to Peterson, he said he knew about the images, but thought he had destroyed them. He said he forgot his camera at work and needed to take photos of a job, so he grabbed a camera from home. He said when he got to work, he printed off what he thought was the work photos, nine to a page, but noticed the indecent photographs were on them so he destroyed them and deleted the digital copies.

The officer told him the photos were in a four-per-page format. Peterson then said he was given a thumb drive to print some images for a photo collage for the girl and that's how he got them. He could not explain why he still had the images in his work desk.

Peterson's home was searched with permission from his girlriend and officers found a hole in a poster in a bathroom that her daughter primarily used. Further investigation revealed a hole in the wall behind the hole in the poster and on the other side of the wall, a box with a hole to match the wall was lined up with it, though no camera was found.

About a month before this incident, his girlfriend had confronted him about wires in the basement and a four-part screen in the basement computer that appeared to be for surveillance cameras. She also confronted him about buying and pawning a borescop, which is a flexible, small tube scope. She also intercepted a camera from Amazon.com.

When she confronted Peterson about the camera, he said he had recorded some of the house areas, but he would not do this anymore and that he was sorry.