Audacious voyeur given home detention
Rowan Blackbourn began by creeping around the student precinct filming women in the shower through their open windows. Within three months he was sneaking into flats in the dead of night and pocketing underwear.
IN one hand he held a pair of women’s underwear, in the other was his phone, casting a dim glow as he crept through the darkened bedrooms.
As the woman stirred, the man slipped from the room and paused in the hallway until he thought she was asleep again.
She was not.
The woman woke and saw the stranger silhouetted by the faint light of the cellphone.
She yelled. He panicked.
He dropped his phone, shot down the stairs, through the lounge where he dropped the undies and out into Dunedin’s unseasonably warm October night.
Clambering over a fence, his wallet fell from his pocket and with that, nearly three months of voyeuristic depravity was over.
No fingerprint analysis or DNA samples were required. Police had everything they needed.
His name was Rowan Edwin Blackbourn, 20 years old, an Otago Polytechnic student.
A burglar.
And, it turned out, a covert filmer. ‘‘We just got into his phone and the videos were there and had all the times and dates,’’ Constable Dean Rogers said.
Following the end of a relationship, Blackbourn fell into a funk.
‘‘I was suffering from major depression and stressrelated issues,’’ he told the Otago Daily Times.
‘‘I am still unsure to this day why I did it.’’ It began on July 25 when Blackbourn was in Queen St.
A woodland path slices almost directly from his former home in Maori Hill through the Town Belt to the north of the city crammed with dingy student digs.
He noticed steam coming from the bathroom window of a flat and walked down some stairs beside the dilapidated property.
Blackbourn activated the video function on his phone and poked his arm inside the room as the woman got out of the shower and got dressed.
The 43second clip was saved in a folder on his phone.
He named it ‘‘the goods’’.
Within three weeks, Blackbourn was just metres from the scene of his previous crime, on Lachlan Ave, when he followed the steam again.
Down a driveway, along a path, his arm jabbed through the semiopen window, a naked woman drying herself.
The 84second video ended when the victim spotted Blackbourn kneeling outside the house.
She yelled at him and he ran home, where he watched the illicit footage before storing it in the same file.
Blackbourn appeared in the Dunedin District Court this week after pleading guilty to five counts of burglary and three of making an intimate visual recording.
Judge Kevin Phillips charted the escalation in the defendant’s behaviour over those weeks.
‘‘The offending was becoming more and more resolute, and more and more premeditated . . . your progress was alarming,’’ he said.
On August 29, Blackbourn overheard his flatmate’s friend planning to use the shower.
He made sure he got in there first, placed his phone in a toilet bag on a shelf and pointed it at the cubicle.
Once the victim had finished, he retrieved the phone and stored the 25minute video with the others.
In the ensuing weeks, Blackbourn also captured his flatmate in the nude, using the same method.
His behaviour became more audacious by September.
In Warrender St, he saw women’s underwear drying on a laundry rack and entered the flat through an unlocked Ranchslider.
Blackbourn stuffed three pairs of panties into his pocket and left when he heard movement upstairs.
The garments were later disposed of.
It was clear the man had ‘‘used them’’ while watching the videos, Judge Phillips said.
In the early hours of October 20, Blackbourn set out on what was to be his final mission.
At the first Queen St property he stole two pairs of undies before climbing over a deck to the neighbouring flat.
While a woman and her partner slept, he reached into a laundry basket and withdrew another pair.
Blackbourn’s luck ended when he woke another flatmate and made his bungled exit from the scene, leaving a trail of undeniable proof.
Defence counsel Noel Rayner said the offending had taken place when his client was intoxicated.
‘‘He may have been drinking but was capable of what he was doing in a stealthy way,’’ the judge said.
‘‘You made the alarming comment to Probation that you got away with it, so you continued to do it.’’
Judge Phillips said Blackbourn was remorseless but the former student, now employed at a freezing works, denied that.
‘‘I totally disagree with his statement as I am fully regretful and sincerely sorry to all the victims I have hurt and done wrong to,’’ he said.
Blackbourn said confronting his flatmates over the secret shower tapes was the ‘‘hardest and most embarrassing experience of my life’’.
He did not see himself as ‘‘a pervert’’ but feared others would.
Blackbourn said he planned to get all the help he could and would likely relocate for a fresh start after serving his sentence.
University of Canterbury criminology professor Greg Newbold said while technology proliferated such behaviour, it was essentially nothing new.
‘‘Panty pinching and bicycleseat sniffing are pretty legendary,’’ he said.
Prof Newbold noted Blackbourn’s increasingly daring acts.
‘‘What you used to do doesn’t quite do it for you any more, and you need a bit more. It happens with serial killers as well. They start off doing relatively minor things but once they get used to them they don’t create the desired degree of satisfaction,’’ he said.
Const Rogers said instilling a sense of personal security in the city’s students was an ongoing battle.
‘‘We try every year but the message just doesn’t sink in,’’ he said.
‘‘We can tell them until we’re blue in the face but it still doesn’t happen.’’
Blackbourn was sentenced to eight months’ home detention and was ordered to pay eight victims $700 each.
Judge Phillips also tacked on more than $100 to the bill, for the stolen underwear.