BOISE, Idaho — A Boise man took explicit photos of a young girl and amassed one of the largest child porn collections investigators on the case had ever seen was sentenced to prison Wednesday.
Gunnar Ericsson, 52, was sentenced to 85 years behind bars, with at least 15 years before he can become eligible for parole.
The resolution of the case was a decade in the making, according to the Ada County Prosecutor's Office. Boise Police first began investigating Ericsson - then going by the name Eric Sausman - in 2010, when his victim reported that he had been molesting her and taking photos of the abuse.
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Ericsson was indicted, but detectives were not able to find any explicit photos of the girl. Just before the case went to trial, the victim recanted, telling officials the abuse had not happened.
The sexual abuse charges were dropped. Police later learned in 2018 that Ericsson had intimidated the girl into recanting her statements to law enforcement.
After the charges were dismissed, the defendant legally changed his name from Eric Sausman to Gunnar Ericsson.
But police got a second chance in October 2017, when they received a cybertip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that six videos of child pornography had been shared from an email account connected to Ericsson.
Investigators recognized him as the suspect in the child abuse case from 2010. During the child pornography investigation, which spanned a year, detectives found child pornography on Ericsson's computer, including 144 bookmarks to sites containing graphic sexual images of children.
As the case went on, detectives also uncovered photos of the original victim from 2010, which Ericsson had uploaded to various pornography and modeling websites.
He was arrested on child pornography and sexual abuse of a child charges in September 2018, and convicted of seven felonies after a trial late last year.
As she handed down the 85-year-sentence, Judge Deborah Bail told Ericsson that he had "fed the darkest parts of the dark web.”
Anyone with information regarding the exploitation of children is encouraged to contact their local law enforcement agency, the Idaho Attorney General’s Internet Against Crimes Unit at 208-9478700 or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678.
