terence pittman / watford Child Sexual Abuser

May 2008 Voyeur with underwear fetish jailed A voyeur with a fetish for underwear is starting an indefinite jail sentence after he was caught filming teenage girls undressing.

Perverted Terrence Pittman, 44, who had a long history of secretly filming girls and stealing knickers, installed miniature cameras in the girls’ bedrooms.

From hours of recordings he produced a DVD of the “edited highlights” of the girls as they got changed.

St Albans crown court heard Pittman was carrying out work in a loft of a house in Watford and made holes in the ceiling of the bedroom of two teenagers.

Patrick Field, prosecuting, said he installed two tiny cameras in the bedrooms and ran wires up to four video recorders in the loft.

He was caught after one of the girls, aged 13, found the camera.

“The four video recorders in the loft were in sequence with one following another on a timer.

They were set for the times when the two girls would be going to bed or getting up in the morning,” said Mr Field.

Pittman was arrested on November 11 2006 by police.

When they searched the home he shared with his mother they found a DVD on which he had edited the highlights of the hours of recording.

It included images of three teenage girls.

Mr Field said Pittman had also hidden in bushes and filmed children in a playground.

One girl said what had happened made her “feel dirty”.

Another said she “felt upset and angry and was scared and anxious”.

As a result of his arrest Pittman, who was on licence having been released after serving two-thirds of a 10 year sentence for arson, was returned to prison.

Pittman, of Leggatts Way, Watford, pleaded guilty to voyeurism and three charges of making indecent images of children.

He had been sentenced to 10 years after using sophisticatedminiature cameras to spy on girls in three schools in Hertfordshire in 1997.

He had also broken into schools and stolen video tapes and still photographs which showed girls dancing, at gym displays or at sports days.

To cover his tracks he had started fires at two schools which caused £130,000 worth of damage.

He broke into other schools and installed covert cameras in girls’ changing rooms.

In January 1991 he had broken a window at a church to look into a room where Brownies were changing.

He had other convictions dating back to 1980 for the theft of knickers and entering houses to steal underwear.

Defence barrister Richard Cross said Pittman suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome.

He said it had been a mistake for Pittman to have been released after serving two thirds of the 10 year sentence without having supervision.

“Nobody has ever got to grip with his Asperger’s.

He has never been given the right treatment,” he said.

Sentencing him Judge John Plumstead told him: “You spied on these girls to gain sexual gratification.

They were entitled to have absolute privacy.” The judge said there was a very high risk of further offending and he said he regarded Pittman as a danger to the public.

He passed an indeterminate sentence for public protection.

This means he will not be released from jail until the parole board think it is safe to do so.

Once he is freed Pittman will be on licence so that he is monitored by probation officers for 10 years July 1998 School video pervert jailed A serial Peeping Tom who broke into a Borehamwood school and secretly filmed girls undressing in a changing room has been jailed for ten years.

Terence Pittman, a handyman from Watford, installed a miniature camera behind a grill in a heating cupboard at Hawksmoor School in Cowley Hill in April last year.

He told police he returned night after night to complete the pain-staking process of installing an elaborate system of wiring, cables and video equipment after breaking in through a skylight on the roof.

Over 17 metres of cable leading to a water-proofed battery and the camera was discovered when it was spotted on the roof by a vigilant school caretaker.

This led to a joint investigation by Metropolitan and Hertfordshire police who uncovered that Pittman had also set up sophisticated video systems at two more Hertfordshire schools — St Albans Girls School and Presdales School in Ware — to film young girls changing.

He set fire to two other schools in St Albans — Marlborough School and the Catholic all-girl Loretto College — causing thousands of pounds of damage.

And Pittman even constructed a hide-out in shrubbery on the grounds of Elstree’s Haberdashers Askes School to secretly take photographs of girls playing sport, St Albans Crown Court heard on Monday.

Over a seven-year period, the 34-year-old stole video tapes and pictures, featuring pupils involved in various dancing and sporting activities, from tens of schools around the county in order to feed his fantasies, Mr Anthony Pitts, prosecuting, told the court.

Pittman was arrested in June last year when he told police the focus of his offending was his fetish for ladies’ underwear and watching young women undress.

Mr Pitts said police had raided Pittman’s home and found a “plethora of material” — hundreds of photographs and videos, some of them stolen from schools.

Sentencing Pittman, Judge Colin Colston QC said: “Behind this offending has been your compulsive desire and need to watch women, or in particular young women in various stages of undress.

Children are entitled to expect when they change, that privacy will be observed by those not in the changing room, which are not places where Peeping Toms should be prying.” He added: “At Hawksmoor School the reaction according to the head teacher was one of bewilderment and shock.

Many felt violated.

They felt extremely angry.

Parents will ask ‘are our children safe?’.” But Judge Colston said that current laws made him powerless to order the confiscation of videos and photographs found at his home, as well as the cameras used by Pittman to spy on girls at Hawksmoor and the two other schools.

Pittman pleaded guilty to six counts of burglary and two of arson and asked for 14 other offences to be taken into consideration, including one burglary where underwear was stolen from a school.

Defending, Richard Kovalevsky, said: “Apart from the indecent photographs, nothing else falls within the definition of sexual offences.

The fires were started in order to make it seem as if young children had started them.” Pittman, who also had previous convictions going back to the 1980s, which included thefts of women’s underwear from washing lines, was convicted by a jury last month of two charges of taking indecent photographs of a girl under 16.

For those convictions the judge ordered Pittman upon his release to inform police and go on a sex offenders’ register indefinitely.