A Timaru man who was honored by Motorsport New Zealand five years ago for his services to the sport has admitted to owning thousands of offensive images and videos of children being sexually exploited.
Christopher Ronald Dunn pleaded guilty to representative charges of possession of indecent publication with knowledge and intent to access a computer system for dishonest purposes when he appeared in Timaru District Court on Tuesday.
The 50-year-old, who received an award from Motorsport NZ in 2017, was under investigation in November 2020 when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received a referral regarding a Facebook user who communicated indecently with a person, state in the summary of the facts.
“An inquiry to Spark Communications showed the subscriber as Dunn…”
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Police executed a search warrant nine months later, seizing two mobile phones, three laptops and a desktop computer, which were analyzed by a digital forensics unit.
There was nothing of interest on two of the laptops, but the other, one of the phones and the desktop computer, had over 4,200 potentially offensive images and 114 potentially offensive videos found.
The phone had 15 thumbnail images in a folder created between March and April 2018.
“The original images were not on the device, indicating they were deleted or accessed remotely,” the abstract says.
A dozen were rated at level one (lowest) of the five levels used to assess “activity or seriousness in considering objectionable publication”. Two images were level two and one was level three.
The phone’s deleted internet history showed web pages with titles indicating potentially offensive material on May 27, 2018, and another site targeting teen online dating opened April-July 2018.
Account usernames and passwords were also found, indicating that the owner had created or had access to the six accounts on the teen dating site.
The desktop computer search revealed more than 1,500 images of sexualized child modeling and child nudists.
On the defendant’s HP Probook laptop, 114 videos and 2750 images were discovered and several saved folders were found, one named “Chris”, which contained three subfolders: desktop, downloads and videos.
“The videos and images are of female children and adolescents…
“Of the videos and images of young children, the descriptions identify three toddlers, a 2-year-old and eight other images where a possible age is described where the child is placed between 5 and 8 years old.”
Analysis of the download folder found 90 offensive videos and more than 250 images of child exploitation.
In the folder of videos “four child exploitation videos were found that were classified as offensive”.
Within the desktop folder was a subfolder, “folder A”, along with another 12 subfolders, containing 20 child exploitation videos and over 2,500 images, which were stored on the laptop between February 2017 and June 2021.
According to the summary, of the videos analyzed, 26 were found to reach level one, 58 reached level two, two reached level 3, 16 reached level four, and two reached level five.
Police identified two of the abused children in the videos, one was a girl in Germany who was abused between 2014-2017 when she was 8-10 years old. The other was a 10-year-old girl in Costa Rica who had been abused in 2017. The perpetrator was arrested and charged.
It is unknown who the children are in the other videos.
One of the 2,700 images identified the perpetrator as “a transnational sex offender who was arrested in the US in 2008 and sentenced to 17.5 years in prison.”
“It is not known who the children in the other images are.”
The second charge related to sexually charged and explicit Internet chats in which Dunn posed as 14, 15 or 16-year-old boys from New Zealand or Australia.
They were all in 2021, between January and April, with chats reportedly involving girls aged 13 to 18 in the US, Philippines, UK and South Africa.
The chats were mainly on Facebook, with Dunn using “Corey Williams” as his fake name, while his laptop had also accessed an online teen dating site more than 4,000 times between December 2015 and July 2020.
Judge Jim Large returned Dunn on bail for sentencing on March 9.