Man jailed for sending explicit messages

CHRISTCHURCH: A repeat child sex offender caught sending explicit messages to a police officer posing as a 13yearold girl has been jailed for 18 months.

Details of how Graeme Murray Purvis (57), who has a long criminal history of child sex offending, was caught were revealed in the Christchurch District Court, where he was sentenced yesterday.

Purvis set up an account with online social network Chatiw in June this year and contacted someone he thought was a 13yearold girl, who was actually a detective with the Online Child Exploitation Across New Zealand Team.

Using Google Hangouts, Purvis then sent the undercover officer a link where they exchanged more than 500 messages, many of them explicit.

Purvis said he would be visiting Christchurch in late July and suggested the “girl” tell her caregiver she was having a sleepover with a school friend so she could spend the night with him.

On the morning of the arranged meeting, he sent more sexually explicit messages — including a photo and video — and tried to convince her to visit his place.

They ended up meeting at a frozen yoghurt shop in Riccarton, where Purvis was arrested.

He ended up pleading guilty to charges of exposing a young person to indecent material, travelling to meet a young person after sexual grooming and failing to comply with reporting obligations as a registered child sex offender.

Yesterday, defence counsel Joshua Grainger said Purvis wanted to undergo treatment but he had been deemed unsuitable because his risk level was so high.

Judge Stephen O’Driscoll highlighted a presentence report which said Purvis showed “little concern” for his offending and held “heavily entrenched beliefs in his attitudes towards authority”.

The judge told Purvis he hoped he would do something to change his pattern of offending.

He was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment with six months of standard and special release conditions, including a ban on using any electronic device which can access the internet without authorisation by a probation officer and not to associate or contact anyone under 16.

In 2016, Purvis was jailed for nearly three years after taking his brother’s laptop and downloading child pornography — just days after a sentence for similar offending ended.

And in 2009 in Dunedin, he was jailed for objectionable publications and trying to sexually groom a 15yearold girl. — The New