A father who pled guilty to the repeated drugging and sexual abuse of his daughter and to her murder, has requested to retract his admission of guilt, it has been reported.

Mark Mesiti, 49, of Modesto, California, was convicted of the murder of his daughter Alycia Allen-Mesiti and 48 other felony sexual assault crimes earlier this month, after his trial was cut short when he entered a guilty plea in exchange for escaping the death penalty.

His guilty plea means he is facing life imprisonment without parole, but on Friday the family of his daughter were told by the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s Office that he intends to ask a judge to allow him to withdraw his plea, the Mercury News reported.

​Alycia was officially reported missing at the age of 14 in 2007 but is understood to have been killed in 2006, less than a year after her father had been awarded custody of herself and her brother. Mesiti was granted custody despite holding convictions for drunk driving and bank fraud, the newspaper reported.

Mesiti’s daughter’s body was discovered buried in her father’s former backyard in 2009. An autopsy found she he died of acute drug intoxication, and her body showed traces of a number of drugs including opiates, morphine, methamphetamine, and anti-depressants.

The DA’s office said detectives searching Mesiti’s LA home at the time of his arrest found he was operating a methamphetamine laboratory and that he possessed hundreds of thousands of images child pornography, hundreds of which showed his daughter being sexually assaulted while unconscious.

Mesiti was convicted of rape, sodomy, oral copulation and child molestation involving his drugged daughter on several occasions, and of taking sexually explicit photographs of his daughter. He also admitted to sexually assaulting and photographing two other minors.