Pervert chiropractor Peter Wayne Snodgrass used twisted camera tricks to film clients
The deceptive techniques of a disgraced chiropractor who filmed patients as they undressed have been revealed in court, as the man explains why he committed his crimes.
Law and Order
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- Chiropractor Peter Snodgrass faces victims who he secretly filmed
- Chiro ‘secretly, indecently filmed women and children’
A pervert Adelaide chiropractor indecently filmed hundreds of his clients — including children aged as young as 11 — using his mobile phone, two pen cameras and a clock radio containing a hidden camera to capture video of them undressing, a court has heard.
Peter Wayne Snodgrass, 52 has previously admitted to more than 200 charges of indecent filming, possessing child-exploitation material and a count of indecent assault.
The self-proclaimed sex addict took the stand in the Supreme Court on Friday to give evidence about his offending and to explain why he filmed certain patients.
Many of his victims filled the gallery.
He told the court he turned to pornography, prostitutes and internet dating before he started to film women at his Rostrevor practice as a “coping mechanism” in the years after his wife died from cancer.
“It was how I coped … it was just how I got through the day,” he said of his offending, which occurred over six years.
He said the indecent filming began when he was massaging a woman and received a text message on his phone.
“I made a very bad decision to take a photograph of her bottom,” he said. “I saw it as a thrill at the time. I looked at it later … I deleted it.”
Snodgrass, a father of three, said for six months he used his mobile phone to film female patients, downloading the footage at home. He said he bought a pen camera out of “frustration” because he found he was often filming patients’ backs.
He later bought a camera hidden in a clock radio, which he could “set-up at chest height” to film patients changing for X-rays, placing it “right in front of them while they were getting changed”.
Snodgrass told the court he treated men, women and children, offering X-rays at his practice every day of the week, but only filmed females because breasts “had always been my sexual preference” and he “just wanted to see more boobs”.
He said there was “no particular rhyme or reason” to those he filmed and it “just depended on my emotions at the time”.
When asked why he had filmed children as young as 11, Snodgrass said he chose “whoever had boobs” and was “fairly reckless” about their age.
“I wasn’t thinking about their age,” he said.
He also admitted to secretly filming some of his sexual partners without their consent.
Snodgrass told the court he would download the material, watch it and give the files names related to the victims’ physical appearance, including some who were underage.
He used sexually explicit terms including “incredible tits”, “big jugs” and “hot 19”.
One his victims read a victim-impact statement to the court, saying she gained the strength to do so after watching many of Snodgrass’s other victims address the court at an earlier hearing.
She labelled Snodgrass’ offending as “calculated, planned and repetitive”.
“What if someone had filmed your children?” she asked.
“Would you be happy for someone to try and justify their actions like you are doing?
“What gives you the right to prey on women for your own gratification?”
At a previous hearing, Snodgrass read an apology to the court, blaming years of unresolved grief and trauma for his crimes.
“I will never take what I’ve done lightly … it makes me feel sick and self-repugnant,” he said.
“I made a terrible mistake in getting lost in the world of pornography and sexual gratification to numb out my emotional pain,” he said.
Justice Anne Bampton will sentence Snodgrass at a later date.
