A "highly disturbing" Hastings man has pleaded guilty to 61 child pornography and sex charges after it was discovered he had more than 700,000 deleted images and video recordings on his computer.
The 48-year-old appeared in Hastings District Court yesterday on 33 counts of making intimate visual recordings, multiple counts of possessing objectionable material, unlawful sexual conduct with a female under 16 and several counts of indecent acts with intent to insult or offend.
The unemployed man was arrested following an operation from the Department of Internal Affairs and Hawke's Bay police's child protection team.
During a raid at his Hastings home on October 3, 2013, Hawke's Bay Police seized his computer equipment and uncovered more than 700,000 deleted images and intimate video recordings.
Hundreds of the images were of teenagers the man knew and some had been obtained from social networking sites, while many more were of females taken in public places without the subjects' knowledge.
The 48-year-old had personalised many of the images by placing the head of the victims on several dozen sexualised internet photos.
In 2006 he began a relationship with a woman who had two children from a previous relationship and in 2009 the couple married and moved to Havelock North.
About one month later, the guilty man hid a video camera in the bathroom used by his teenage stepdaughter and stepson.
Police and Internal Affairs uncovered the man made 19 separate covert recordings throughout 2009 and 2010 in the bathroom, the majority of which were of the stepdaughter but included five videos of the stepdaughter's friends.
In 2012 the family moved to Hastings where he again set up a hidden camera and recorded on 14 occasions his stepdaughter, stepson and two teenage girls in the bathroom.
A series of 20 "highly disturbing" photographs were also taken sometime prior to August 23, 2010 of the man exposing himself next to his then 15-year-old stepdaughter as she slept.
She had been having "trouble sleeping" at the time and her stepfather had given her sleeping tablets for the complaint.
A similar series of photos were taken of his stepdaughter and her friend, who was staying overnight.
The investigation into the Hastings man also found "strikingly similar" photos taken a decade earlier, in the late 1990s, when the man lived in Auckland.
With his then wife asleep in a nearby room he exposed himself to her sleeping friend, before turning the camera towards himself and taking a photo while poking his tongue out.
He also expressed in sickening detail his daily routines to an undercover Internal Affairs operative on an online chat website, which helped lead to his arrest.
Judge Tony Adeane allowed the man to keep his name suppression and denied media from taking his photo because of the potential harmful impact on his victims.
He was remanded on bail until sentencing at Hastings District Court on October 22.