June 2016

Child abuse images addict filmed men in hospital toilets with secret camera

A hospital bio-chemist set up a secret camera in the gents staff toilets.

Films he had taken of men using the toilets were discovered by police when they searched his home in relation to an inquiry into images of child sexual abuse.

Steven Wynne, 33, of Ash Grove, Chirk, admitted four charges of making indecent images by downloading them from the internet, four charges of possessing them and a voyeurism charge.

He had been filming adult men doing a private act at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, where he worked, for his own sexual gratification.

Appearing at Mold Crown Court on Thursday, Wynne, who has since been dismissed and now carries out voluntary work, was placed on rehabilitation and sent on a three year internet sex offender programme.

He must register with the police as a sex offender for five years and a five year sexual harm prevention order was made.

Judge Geraint Walters told Wynne, who had no previous convictions, that he was an achiever who graduated with a bio-chemistry degree and found a job at the hospital.

“Outwardly your life was perfectly normal,” he said, “but underneath all that there was a secret that only you knew.”

It was a secret which involved routinely accessing pornographic images of children. “It became an obsession,” the judge said, and Wynne had been found with a large number of images and movies.

But it did not end there.

He was found to have hidden mini cameras in the staff gents’ toilets at the hospital and adult males using the facilities had been recorded by him.

That filming had involved some degree of determination and sophistication and there was an element of a breach of trust.

Men wering white coats could be seen using the toilets. They had a right to feel let down by him but although they were wearing ID badges their identities could not be made out.

“There may be some re-assurance that no-one’s identity was recorded,” he said.

But the judge told him: “It is hard to imagine someone sinking to greater depths while outwardly appearing decent and an achiever in the workplace.”

It emerged that Wynne had unfettered access to the internet at an early age when he started watching pornography when he should have been protected from such things.

Wynne also questioned his own sexuality, said the judge. He had not worked out who he was or who he wanted to be, and the judge said he needed to grapple with that issue before he could try to “restore some dignity” into his life.

Judge Walters said the sentence Wynne would receive would give him a chance to prove that he could change.

Barrister Simon Rogers, prosecuting, said in March, 2015 police searched Wynne’s home and seized a number of computer equipment items and 16 mini cameras. A number of the cameras had white Velcro strips on them.

On his way to the police station he said he had done some disgusting, horrible things, but then answered “no comment” in interview.

One computer contained 522 indecent images of children and on another there were more than 4,500 – more than 2,000 at the worst category A, mainly of young male children being sexually abused.

The films taken in the toilets were found and when an officer visited the hospital Velcro strips where the cameras had been positioned in the toilet cisterns were found.