A man with a 44-year history of sex offenses, including a conviction that deported him from Australia, has been sent back to prison on new charges.
Glenn Alan Kiddell, 64, has pleaded guilty to multiple counts of owning and sharing more than 1,000 child exploitation images and videos, most of which were serious.
Judge Tony Fitzgerald sentenced him to two years and three months in prison in Auckland District Court on Wednesday afternoon.
In July 2020, Kiddell was under an extended custody order as a released sex offender when he told a case manager he had a cell phone but no internet access or social media accounts.
However, the officer later learned that he had an undeclared phone on which police would find 1561 child exploitation images and videos.
A police forensic team assigned about two-thirds of the images to the more serious end of the image scale of child exploitation.
More than 1,000 images were also classified as “difficult for age” where there are doubts that the people in them were minors.
Court records show that Kiddell was first convicted of obscene disclosure in 1978.
In Australia, convictions followed in 1986, 1989 and 1990 for willful exposure – an insult that Kiddell said was due to his participation in a nudist community.
In 2011, a New Zealand jury found him guilty of masturbating on a beach in front of a teenage girl who was swimming there, but he fled to Australia before being convicted.
Four years later, in 2015, an Australian court sentenced him to eight months in prison for masturbating in front of a nine-year-old girl at a swimming pool, asking her to touch him and grabbing the child as she swam away.
After his release, he was deported to New Zealand and sentenced to intensive surveillance and community service on the 2011 conviction.
He was convicted again in 2016 after attempting to groom a police officer who posed online as a 13-year-old girl in the Philippines.
During the investigation, police found images and videos of child abuse on Kiddell’s computer, resulting in a two-year prison sentence for possession of indecent material.
After his release from prison in 2017, he was placed under an extended custody order – special release restrictions reserved for offenders who are believed to pose “a real and ongoing risk of further sexual or violent offences”.
Kiddell was under this supervisory order when he committed his most recent child pornography offenses in 2020.
In court today, his attorney Antonio Spika asked the judge to consider house arrest, saying Kiddell had begun “extensive rehabilitation” since February 2021, even before those charges were brought.
His offense is linked to abuse and trauma he suffered as a child and has now been diagnosed with an impulse disorder, the attorney said.
He is being treated, goes to weekly counseling and has shown genuine remorse, Spika said, citing a letter Kiddell wrote to the court and his regular donations to a children’s charity.
However, police prosecutor Lucy Na said that given the seriousness of the sex offenses and the relevant criminal record, imprisonment was the most appropriate sentence.
Judge Fitzgerald said Kiddell’s efforts deserved credit, but this was offset by his relevant convictions in Australia.
He said Kiddell was assessed as having a high risk of recidivism and harm, and recommended that he continue his rehabilitation and join Te Piriti’s sex offender treatment program.
The judge also noted several positive letters of support from Kiddell’s church group and community, a handful of whom sat in the public gallery for the extended sentencing, which was split into three hearings later in the day.
Kiddell turned to nod to his supporters before being escorted away by security officers.
