Man jailed for assaulting women on camera

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This article was published 26/09/2023 (833 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A man who videotaped and photographed nude, unconscious women in his St. Andrews home — sexually assaulting two of them — and employed a hidden camera to record women using his washroom has been sentenced to 10 years in prison by a provincial court judge.

In a case Judge Malcolm McDonald called “difficult and troubling,” Kelvin William Watson, 47, was accused of two counts of sexual assault, three counts of voyeurism and one count of possessing child pornography.

He previously pleaded guilty to the charges, which stemmed from incidents between 2019 and 2021, before his sentencing hearing in front of McDonald on Monday.

Crown prosecutor Andrew Clark outlined Watson’s crimes and the police investigation, which began when an ex-girlfriend of Watson’s told the Selkirk RCMP on April 22, 2021, that Watson had showed her multiple images and videos of a woman — a friend of his son’s who had been living at his home in St. Andrews — using the bathroom and showering.

“She told police that the accused had a number of devices in his residence, including two laptops and several USB sticks,” Clark said, reading from an agreed statement of facts.

Watson was arrested on Aug. 11, 2021, and was charged with one count of voyeurism and released on an undertaking. Investigators obtained a search warrant and seized multiple electronic devices from his home; they secured another warrant to search the devices in June 2022. He was charged with the other offences in July 2022.

On one of the devices, RCMP found a file containing subfolders named for the victims, which contained images and videos of the women.

Ultimately, investigators found Watson had recorded nine women — including the two women he assaulted, the first woman identified by police, and six women who police did not identify — either while they were unconscious in his home or while they were using the toilet or showering in his house’s washroom. He also surreptitiously took videos and photographs of women in a local Walmart parking lot, court heard.

Clark told court Watson assaulted one of the women by penetrating her with his fingers and licking her breast while she was asleep, and assaulted the other woman by licking her breast. Both of the women had been in intimate relationships with Watson at points and both of the assaults were recorded.

Investigators also discovered, on Watson’s computer and a USB thumbdrive, a trove of 1,521 unique images and 152 unique videos of children being sexually abused.

“The majority of the child pornography images and videos depict females aged one to 13,” Clark told court. “The material appears to have been downloaded or traded from the internet.”

The images and videos of child sexual abuse were graphically described to the court by RCMP internet child exploitation unit Const. Kirandeep Hira while the judge viewed them.

Clark asked McDonald that Watson be sentenced to 10 years in prison, noting among the aggravating factors was that his crimes were planned and deliberate.

The prosecutor read a statement from one of Watson’s sexual assault victims, who cannot be identified due to a publication ban. The woman wrote that she felt emotionally broken.

“I trusted him with my life,” she wrote, noting she had previously been sexually assaulted and had had difficulty trusting men. “The one guy I let in has just proven to me again that I can’t trust men.”

Watson’s defence lawyer, Ethan Pollock, argued his client should be sentenced to 71/2 years in prison.

Pollock noted that Watson, an Indigenous man who had been adopted into a white family after he was sexually abused in foster care, had begun committing the offences after one of his children died by suicide while in foster care in 2018.

Watson then began to drink alcohol to numb the pain of his daughter’s death, Pollock told court, and committed the offences while intoxicated.

Pollock argued that those Gladue factors — parts of an Indigenous person’s background that must be considered by courts while sentencing — played a role in Watson’s offending and could provide context to why he committed the crimes.

“This person has an incredible amount of trauma. … He hasn’t gone to therapy, he hasn’t been able to access resources in the community for whatever reason, and it has manifested a depraved sexual interest,” Pollock said.

The lawyer noted Watson was alienated from his Indigenous culture during his childhood. His adoptive parents, Pollock said, overcompensated and did not discipline Watson for his bad behaviour. The result, said Pollock, was a man who did not face consequences for his actions.

McDonald ruled in line with the Crown’s recommendation and ordered Watson to register as a sex offender for 20 years. Numerous other court orders were also imposed.

Watson will serve about eight years and two months, which accounts for time served in jail before his sentencing.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca