Evergreen Reporter

A former St. Louis County, Missouri teacher on Monday admitted possessing child pornography and producing child pornography with cameras he had hidden in his home and office.

Joseph R. Gutowski, 42, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in St. Louis to one count of producing child pornography and one count of receiving child pornography.

Gutowski admitted hiding cameras in his office at Lafayette High School and in his home. He secretly filmed minors and traded some of those images with others online, his plea agreement states. He was also a member of an underground child pornography group on Mega, a cloud storage service, and traded videos he had secretly recorded of an adult in the "Club Creep" group on Mega.

Gutowski attempted to delete child sexual abuse material from nearly all of his electronic devices before they were seized by law enforcement, according to his plea agreement. He deleted 25,377 files from his Dropbox account alone.

Gutowski is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 23, 2024. The production charge carries a potential penalty of 15 to 30 years in prison and the receiving charge carries a potential penalty of five to 20 years in prison.

The FBI and the St. Louis County Police Department Special Investigations Unit investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jillian Anderson is prosecuting the case.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys' Offices and the Department of Justice Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as identify and rescue victims.

For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc.