Man jailed on porn charge

SANDPOINT — A man from West Virginia was arrested early Saturday morning for possessing child pornography.

Dennis Joseph Burke was ordered held Monday on $100,000 and a public defender has been appointed to represent him, court records indicate.

Burke, 51, is charged with possession of sexually exploitive material, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Burke, who was staying at the Country Inn in Sagle, was arrested after another guest of the motel discovered Burke had the pornography on a laptop computer. The other tenant, Charles T. Boyd, told a sheriff’s deputy Burke had tried to sell him child pornography and Boyd decided to take matters into his own hands.

“He had handcuffed him to the bed,” Deputy Jason Wiedebush testified during a probable cause hearing on Monday.

But Burke managed to slip his hand out of the restraint, escaped and allegedly threatened Boyd with a knife, court records said. Authorities were summoned and Burke was arrested at about 3:15 a.m., according to dispatch records.

Under questioning by Bonner County Prosecutor Louis Marshall, Wiedebush testified that Burke initially denied the laptop belonged to him.

However, Marshall advised Judge Barbara Buchanan that Burke later admitted that the computer was his and that it contained as many as 200,000 illegal images.

Marshall added that Burke is being prosecuted in West Virginia for possession of child porn.

A preliminary hearing in the Idaho case is pending.

In an unrelated case, a Sandpoint man is facing five to 10 years in prison for possessing sadomasochistic images of children. Greg Lamar Roberts, 47, pleaded guilty to possessing the material last year and is scheduled to be sentenced on April 23 in 1st District Court.