15-year sentence sought for sex crimes

Repeat offender said he thought child porn would help him stop abusing kids

In 1993, Russell Dennis Wolfe broke into the apartment of a woman he believed to be a sex worker, wearing a mask and armed with a knife, and attempted to rape her.

He was 34 and had no prior criminal record or indication of sexual deviancy. In the opinion of Dr. Shabehram Lohrasbe, a forensic psychiatrist who interviewed Wolfe in 2017, the man went from zero to extreme violence.

It appears Wolfe was devastated by an unfaithful marriage but was too dependent to leave, Lohrasbe said Thursday, testifying at Wolfe’s long-term-offender hearing in Saskatoon. Instead, he took out his anger at his wife on female sex workers, dehumanizing them.

From 1997 until 2008, Wolfe paid young, vulnerable girls between the ages of nine and 17 for sex. He made child pornography by taking nude photos of the girls and recording their sex acts, and stored them on USB sticks that he hid around his house, located across the street from King George elementary school.

According to Lohrasbe’s report, Wolfe said he stopped seeing the “working girls” in 2006 when he quit drinking. He said he started using child porn as a “transition” to less harmful behaviour.

Wolfe was arrested in 2015 after investigators traced child porn to his IP address and subsequently found the child porn he had made in his home. He pleaded guilty last year to 20 charges of child sex assault, child porn and child prostitution-related charges involving 14 girls. Court heard statements from four of the victims on Monday.

The Crown and defence are seeking a long-term-offender designation for Wolfe that would see him sentenced to 15 years — minus a five-year remand credit — followed by a 10-year supervision order. For the judge to accept the joint submission, lawyers must demonstrate Wolfe is a high risk to reoffend but that his risk can be managed in the community.

“He hasn’t really spent a lot of time thinking hard about the victims and the damage that he has done,” Lohrasbe noted, adding Wolfe avoids moral responsibility by blaming victims and insisting he thought the girls were 14 — the legal age of consent before 2008.

Lohrasbe said it appears Wolfe’s motivation to change comes from a desired relationship with his sons and the knowledge that if he reoffends he will likely die in prison.

“I don’t want to be like this. I want a reason to be proud,” Wolfe told Lohrasbe.

Court heard the programming he received in the ’90s was tailored to sex offending against adults, not children, and wasn’t the highintensity

He hasn’t really spent a lot of time thinking hard about the victims and the damage that he has done.

sex offender programming that exists now.

Lohrasbe concluded that Wolfe’s future risk of hands-on offending can likely be managed, largely because of his advancing age. However, the internet-based offending will be harder to manage because child pornography is becoming more available and easier to access, he told court.