Mirror Mirror on the Wall, who's the creepiest of them all?

July 21, 2009
Rob O'Flanaganroflanagan

A Guelph man was found guilty after a short trial Tuesday for possession of child pornography. Giulio Carere, 48, will be sentenced on Oct. 7.
A Guelph Police officer with expertise in computer forensic analysis testified Tuesday in Ontario Court of Justice that he discovered 45 child pornography videos on Carere’s home computer.
Justice Norman Douglas ruled there was no doubt the videos were child pornography, and no doubt that Carere downloaded them on to his computer through a peer-to-peer file sharing network.
Under questioning by assistant Crown attorney Murray deVos, Constable Bruce Hunter said the discovery of the videos came after a search warrant was executed and a computer seized at Carere’s home at 44 Manitoba St., in Guelph, in early February, 2008.
The videos depicted explicit sex acts involving primarily girls between the ages of six to 16, testimony in court revealed.
Hunter’s descriptions of some of the videos – with titles such as “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” and “Y07 St. Petersburg” – were disturbing. Some involved sex acts between children, others between adults and children. He said such material is distributed over internet-based peer-to-peer networks free of charge, or “traded as a commodity” over the internet.
Carere was also charged with one count of making available child pornography, but Douglas found him not guilty of the charge.
Dressed in a loose fitting black suit, his thinning hair slicked back, Carere sat in the front row of the courtroom staring directly ahead. At times, his knees twitched, as he listened to Hunter’s testimony.
Carere was arrested as part of a province-wide sweep by law enforcement agencies. It saw 22 people, most of them in southern Ontario, arrested and charged in early 2008. It was the largest coordinated child pornography investigation in Ontario’s history, police officials stated then.
Another Guelph man, Keith Kamenz, 31, was arrested in the same probe. He pled guilty to possession of child pornography in February and was sentenced on April 30 to four months in jail, and three years probation. As part of his sentence, Kamenz was given a 10-year restriction on going into public areas where there are children. He is not allowed to take employment that brings him in contact with children under the age of 16.
As part of his child pornography investigative work, Hunter uses software that allows access to all files on a computer. Even those that have been erased remain embedded in the computer’s hard-drive until such time as they are written over, he told the court.
The child pornography Carere had on his hard-drive was easily accessible, Hunter said. The videos ranged in length from short clips of one or two seconds, to videos of 30 or more minutes. Most of the videos had amateur production qualities, as though shot by a consumer level camcorder, he added.
“It’s sad that this material is out there,” Hunter said in an interview. “It’s sad that we have to keep going through this. There’s a continued demand, and until we can stop the demand we’ll have to go through this. Maybe the demand will go away some day. Let’s hope so.”