Abuser guilty of child sex

A West Coast sex offender suddenly admitted 31 offences today, breaking down in court as the second of his five child sex victims was giving evidence against him in a Christchurch District Court jury trial.

The 52-year-old man — who was a railways engineer and a part-time radio announcer and disc jockey while on the West Coast — was remanded in custody for sentence on September 16.
Judge Philip Moran ordered a pre-sentence report on the man, and victim impact reports on the girls. He gave the Crown the option of seeking victim impact reports prepared by psychologists, if it wished.
The accused had pleaded not guilty to 44 charges when the trial began on Monday morning.
However, he changed his pleas on 31 charges today and the Crown said it would not proceed with 13 of the original charges. The man admitted offences against all five of the girls, and the guilty pleas saved three of them from having to give evidence.
At the time of the pleas this morning, the jury was hearing evidence from a girl who was going to tell of being sexually abused by the man and then confronting him with a slug gun to try to halt the abuse she had seen him beginning on her five-year-old sister.
The girl who took the gun from her was also named as a victim in several of the sex charges.
The Crown said the offending took place in a series of small West Coast towns from 1997 to 2003, when the girls were aged from five to about 12.
The police investigations began in 2004 but by then the accused had moved to Australia. He was spoken to on his return home in 2007 with his partner, telling Greymouth police that he would agree to an interview but first wanted to drop his partner home. He did not return to the police station and the couple were located the following day at Christchurch Airport trying to board a flight to Australia, a day earlier than they had booked.
The accused was eventually allowed to return to Australia on condition that he return for a trial in January 2009. He did not return as promised and was eventually located in Western Australia and extradited to New Zealand to face the charges.
He today pleaded guilty to numerous charges of doing an indecent act, indecent assault, detaining the girls for the purpose of having sex, and 17 charges of sexual violation.
The offending involved getting the girls to touch his genitals, touching the girls, showing his genitals while he was reading a pornographic magazine, and acts of oral sex.
Defence counsel Elizabeth Bulger asked for time to discuss the case with the man during the evidence from the second complainant, and then had the charges put to him again for the guilty pleas to be entered.