Former director pleads not guilty to child porn charges

A former Valero official who was arrested after police say they found child pornography on his laptop computer has pleaded not guilty to eight counts of pornography involving juveniles and three counts of obstruction of justice.

James Ronald Guillory, 58, was the director of human resources and public affairs for Valero St. Charles Refinery but was released after his arrest, according toValero spokesman Bill Day.

Guillory was arrested in December after authorities say they discovered child pornography on his home computer. From January through March, a detective with the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office observed an IP address that was downloading and sharing several known images of child pornography. The detective eventually traced the IP address to Guillory’s home, according to the arrest report.

During the same time period, investigators with both the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office High Tech Crime Unit and the Louisiana State Police also observed the same IP address download child pornography, the report said. In fact, the State Police say they were able to download several such images directly from Guillory’s computer.

Authorities executed a search warrant on May 17 and seized two desktop computers and a laptop computer from Guillory’s home office. According to the lead detective in the case, Guillory told him that he had a problem with porn and had downloaded and viewed several movies and images of child pornography. Guillory told the detective that he was deleting the images and movies after he had viewed them, the report said.

When police performed forensics on Guillory’s three computers, they could only find one known image of child pornography, which was located on Guillory’s laptop, they say. However, several more files with names strongly suggestive of child porn were discovered on all three computers, but the file contents could not be recovered because they were destroyed by a computer program called Evidence Eliminator, court documents said.