NOTTINGHAMSHIRE MAN JAILED FOR STALKING AND VOYEURISM
An 'obsessed' stalker from Nottinghamshire set up secret cameras to film a woman showering and plotted her movements by getting a mobile phone in her car without her knowledge.Nottingham Crown Court heard how, after capturing the victim naked, father-of-two Darren Smith then saved the videos and images to a computer to view for his own sexual pleasure.
His sentencing hearing was told how the woman found the Galaxy Samsung “velcroed” to fabric in her vehicle.
And in a statement the woman told how she has had to move away from the county and that it “will take a long time for me to get my life back on track” as a result of what the defendant subjected her to.
Handing Smith a two-year jail term, suspended for two years, Judge William Harbage KC said: “You saved the recordings on a hard drive of her showering and this was done for your own sexual gratification and you admitted you must have been sexually-attracted to her to do that.
Any other explanation is, frankly, so implausible it is absurd.
This was a gross offence which intruded on her privacy to an extraordinary degree.
“You interfered with her car and placed a phone inside it to track her and the only sensible explanation is that you were obsessed with her.
She felt sick and petrified because of your stalking and describes what you did as ‘crushing’ her.
“She has now had to change her normal daily activities to stop you stalking her.” David Hamer, prosecuting, said Smith stalked the woman for a four-month period during 2022.
He said the defendant had looked through her front door when she was not there.
The prosecutor said: “In November, 2022, she saw Mr Smith run from her when it was parked at her workplace and on December 7, after viewing CCTV she saw Mr Smith go to her car and place something inside it.
“That turned out to be a Samsung Galaxy mobile phone he had velcroed.
She believed he must have got hold of a spare set of her car keys somehow to do it and, following his arrest, a set of keys were found at his home which unlocked her car.” Mr Hamer read out part of a victim impact statement the woman made.
In it she said she felt “petrified” and how she felt his stalking was “crushing me”.
Smith, of Bankside, Retford, pleaded guilty to voyeurism and stalking.
Lucy Jones, mitigating, said since his arrest, her client has been seeing a sex therapist in a bid to better understand the root cause of his offending.
She said: “He was spying on her and he did get sexual gratification and these offences have caused a great deal of shame for Mr Smith.
He has been married for 27 years and has two sons and his family is financially reliant on him.”
