Sex offender denies knowing accusers
Pritchard to continue testimony today
A35-year-old convicted sex offender on trial for luring a couple of underage girls and having sex with one of them, never knew the girls or even heard of them before they testified against him in court, he said Tuesday. Trevor Philip Pritchard denied communicating with the girls by Facebook Messenger or exchanging photos with them, and said he has no idea how messages or pictures from the girls appeared on his cellphone between September 2016 and January 2017, the dates of the alleged offences.
“Not a clue,” he stated several times as lawyer Bill Wister questioned him during day 10 of the trial in Lethbridge Court of Queen’s Bench.
Pritchard, who is charged with two counts of child luring and one count each of sexual assault and possession of child pornography, is accused of luring the girls on Facebook using his own name and that of Phillip Fieldcamper. However, he testified Fieldcamper is not his user name — Phillip, he pointed out, is not spelled the same — and he’s never used it or even heard of it.
He denied communicating with either girl on Facebook and denied meeting one of them or ever having sex with her, despite her earlier testimony that they did on multiple occasions.
“Did you tie her up with yellow rope?” Wister asked. “No, I did not,” Pritchard responded. During cross-examination by co-Crown prosecutor Sarah Goard-Baker, Pritchard still denied sending messages to the girls and others, even though his Facebook records were seized and examined by police. Goard-Baker went through dozens of pages of Facebook conversations between Pritchard and various people, including the underage girls, and while he admitted he sent some messages to some people, he denied sending or receiving others.
He admitted having a conversation with a friend on his Facebook account Jan. 5, 2017, in which he tells her his girlfriend is upset he didn’t take her to a New Year’s Eve dance. On the same day Phillip Fieldcamper has almost the same conversation on his Facebook account with one of the underage complainants in the case and says his girlfriend is being a “bitch” because he didn’t take her to the dance. Pritchard denied sending the message. The accused has also admitted he owned two cellphones, which were examined by police, but during cross-examination he claimed one of the phones the Crown presented Tuesday was not his. He also denied the person named Fieldcamper is the owner of the cellphone, even though police found Fieldcamper’s signature on the phone. When the Crown suggested the name was found on the phone because Pritchard used that name, he simply said “nope.”
The Crown is expected to continue questioning Pritchard today.
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