MANTI—Wes Mangum joined the Sanpete County Attorney’s Office as a deputy county attorney in 2018, six-plus years ago.

            One of his first cases was a child sex abuse case in which Peter L. Howard, now 60, of Spring City, was accused of inappropriate touching of a young relative, who was between 10-13 at the time.

            During the same encounter, Howard is accused of showing the child a pornographic video and then threatening him with severe punishment if he ever told anybody what had happened.

            Mangum still has the Howard case. He has steered it through an almost unimaginable legal labyrinth. One of the most flabbergasting points was when Howard, whose charges included witness tampering, accused Mangum himself of witness tampering and wanted to call the deputy county attorney as a witness.

            “It’s kept me up at night,” Mangum says of the case.

            Court records show Howard has been charged with child sex abuse four times in Utah County, dating back to 1983, when he would have been 18 years old. In one of those cases, he was also charged with witness tampering, the same charge that also came up in Sanpete County. And records reveal a fifth case in which he was charged with lewdness. 

            Court records don’t show all the case outcomes. But they do show he pleaded guilty in at least one case, no contest in another and received a plea in abeyance in another. One case ended in a mistrial. None of the cases led to prison time.

            “I have fought this case tooth and nail because I believe the victim, and I believe Mr. Howard has not been properly held accountable for his actions, which has caused him to re-offend.”

            Throughout the case, Howard has maintained his innocence and demanded a jury trial. A trial date was set at least three times.

            But according to Mangum, Howard’s attorneys (he has had three of them) have discouraged him from going to trial and encouraged him to accept a plea deal instead. That may be because child sex abuse is the only crime in Utah where a defendant’s criminal history is admissible in court.

            The alleged incident leading to the charges currently in court happened between 2013 and 2015, when the child involved was between 10 and 13 years old.

            The boy’s family was living in Logan and came to visit Howard in Spring City. The child told authorities Howard took him to the mountains, which is where the alleged abuse occurred.

            It took the child at least three years to tell an adult about the incident. It ended up being reported to the Utah Division of Child and Family Service (DCFS). In September, 2018, that agency called the Sanpete County Attorney’s Office.

            Initially, Mangum did not know about the inappropriate touching. He charged Howard with “dealing in materials harmful to a minor” for showing the child the video and “witness tampering” for swearing him to secrecy.

            Four months later, in January 2019, after talking with the victim and learning the full scope of what the victim said had happened, Mangum amended his charges to include “aggravated sexual abuse of a child,” a first-degree felony.

            The incident was “aggravated,” Mangum says, because Howard, as a relative, had what the law defines as a “special relationship” with the child, which made the child more vulnerable to going along with the abuse and not telling about it. A defendant convicted of aggravated sexual abuse can be sentenced to life in prison.

            But when a preliminary hearing was held in February, 2019, Judge Marvin Bagley rejected the aggravated sexual abuse charge. The judge said sexual abuse of a child can only be charged as a first-degree felony if the victim was under 14, and it was not clear how old the victim was at the time of the incident outside Spring City.

            That helped lead to Mangum amending the charge several times. Mangum was able to determine the timeframe of the incident, which proved the oldest the child could have been at the time would have been 13.

            He also learned more about Howard’s criminal history, which made him a candidate for life in prison without the possibility of parole. Meanwhile, COVID happened, which shut down the courts.

            To clear things up, in March, 2023, Mangum moved to dismiss earlier charges and filed new charges—the same ones he had offered four years earlier. He charged Howard with aggravated sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony; and dealing in materials harmful to a minor and witness tampering, both third-degree felonies.

            Howard’s attorney responded with a motion to dismiss all charges on grounds Howard had been denied his right to a speedy trial.

            Judge Bagley denied the defense motion. “(During) this entire case, the defense has dragged its feet,” the judge said. “They’ve asked for continuances, they’ve stipulated continuances, we’ve had COVID. I’ve tried to push this case toward trial, and the defense has been every bit (as much) a part of wanting to delay it as the prosecution.”

            Since new charges had been filed, Bagley essentially started the case over and ordered a new preliminary hearing. Howard, through his attorney, waived the hearing. A trial date was set, but the date was vacated to permit negotiations toward a possible plea.  

            “We started negotiating, sharing evidence,” Mangum says.

            Finally, Howard’s attorney proposed a settlement. He wanted charges that would not involve incarceration.

            “I wouldn’t do it,” Mangum says. “I would rather go to trial than allow this type of incident without incarceration.”

            By March 2024, another trial date had been set. Then Sunday when Mangum was at home, Howard’s attorney forwarded an anonymous text message containing a videotape in which the victim, who Mangum had been working with for five-and-a-half years, recanted his allegations of abuse.

            Mangum gave the tape to detectives in the Sanpete County Sheriff’s Office. The detectives traced the phone number to one of Howard’s stepsons.

            Mangum talked to the victim, who said two of Howard’s stepsons, one of whom was in college, had approached him and told him Howard would give him a car and $5,000 if he recorded the video. He didn’t understand that recording the video could undermine his court case.

            “I believe your story,” Mangum told the youth. “You were basically bribed.”

            Mangum filed witness tampering against both stepsons. One offered to cooperate. He identified Howard as the person who had asked him and his brother to make the offer to the victim.

              The stepson said he had not understood that by communicating the offer, he might be committing a crime. He offered to cooperate with the prosecution. In return, Mangum dismissed charges against him.

            The other stepson declined to cooperate and ended up pleading guilty to a third-degree felony charge of witness tampering.

            All that led to Howard’s assertion that Mangum, by interrogating and charging the step-sons, was “witness tampering.”

            In the face of the apparent attempt to bribe the victim, “I said ‘no more,’” Mangum said. He added “obstruction of justice,” a second-degree felony, to Howard’s charges. Then he got a judge to revoke Howard’s bail. In April, 2024, Howard was arrested and held in the Sanpete County Jail for approximately one month.

            Finally on May 6, 2024, Howard pleaded guilty to significantly reduced charges of sex abuse of a child and exposing a child to harmful materials, both third-degree felonies. The obstruction of justice charge was dropped.

            After fighting so long for a first-degree felony conviction, why did Mangum drop down to the two third-degree felonies? He said he wanted first-degree felonies charges on the books so if the defendant insisted on going to trial, he could get the maximum sentence.

             By the time the plea was being negotiated, he said the victim, while willing to testify at a trial if needed, wanted to move on with his life. “He just wanted to have a resolution so it could be brought to an end,” Mangum said.

            A third-degree felony carries a sentence of 0-5 years in prison. The court could require the sentences on the two counts to be served back-to-back, which could keep Howard in prison for 10 years.

            Sentencing was set for July, two months after the plea. That was supposed to be the end of the case. It wasn’t.

            Howard got a new attorney. Then he filed a motion to withdraw his guilty plea. He claimed he hadn’t understood what he was doing when he pleaded to the third-degree charges. And he claimed he had been denied his diabetes medicine in jail, which had clouded his judgment.

            When he sought to withdraw his plea, Judge Bagley again revoked bail and returned him to jail. That’s where he’s been for the past seven months.

            On Jan. 22 of this year, Judge Mandy Larsen, who took over the case after Bagley retired, delivered a 47-minute ruling from the bench denying the motion for withdrawal of plea. She assigned Mangum to put the ruling in writing, based on the courtroom audiotape. The written version was seven pages.

            The ruling said the plea agreement had been clearly stated by Howard’s attorney in open court. “He understood what he was doing,” Mangum says.

            As for denial of the diabetes medication, Mangum said diabetes doesn’t affect mental judgment. Significantly, Mangum listened to hours of Howard’s phone calls from jail in which the defendant revealed he himself had refused to take the medication.

            Sentencing was set for Feb. 19. On Feb. 3, Howard appealed Judge Larsen’s ruling to the Utah Court of Appeals. Mangum says it could take “weeks or months” for the appeals court to rule.

            “He’s doing everything he can to avoid going to prison, which is exactly where I’m going to send him,” Mangum says.