Former Valero director guilty of child porn possession

Sentenced to 2 years in jail

A former Valero official will serve two years in prison after pleading guilty to nine counts of pornography involving juveniles and one count of obstruction of justice.

James Ronald Guillory, 59, of 205 Lac Cypriere Drive in Luling, was arrested in November after authorities say they discovered child pornography on his home computer during an undercover investigation. Guillory previously served as the director of human resources and public affairs for Valero St. Charles Refinery.

He was sentenced to two years in prison on each count, but will serve the sentences concurrently. He was denied probation, parole or a suspension of his sentence, which he will begin serving on Aug. 1.

Guillory was also fined $2,500 and must register as a sex offender upon his release from jail.

From January through March of last year, 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, 2011 and seized two desktop computers and a laptop computer from Guillory’s home office. According to the lead detective in the case, Guillory then 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 arrest 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 officials say they were destroyed by a computer program called Evidence Eliminator.

Authorities believe that the Evidence Eliminator software was downloaded by Guillory on May 4. On that day, Guillory noticed a detective parked near his home and asked the detective what he was doing at his residence.

According to the Evidence Eliminator website, the program can delete files from a computer’s hard drive so that they can not be discovered during a law enforcement investigation.