‘A Trappe man who allegedly used an elaborate mirror system to act upon his fetish for watching unsuspecting females go to the bathroom or undress in school locker rooms was captured at Spring-Ford Intermediate School in Royersford Tuesday night… Divincenzo, authorities alleged, directed the girls and their mothers to the men’s bathroom areas by hanging homemade computer-generated signs in the school’s hallways that indicated the women’s bathrooms were out of service. Divincenzo would then wait for the females to enter the men’s room where he had strategically placed the mirrors… Inside the men’s locker room, authorities found a mirror had been placed on the floor at an angle. ‘Using this mirror, someone could view inside the stalls from a location near the door of the locker room,’ [said police]… Divincenzo allegedly claimed he had no interest in the activities of the young girls and was only interested in watching the mothers or adult females who used the bathroom.” — Norristown Times Herald (US)

Of all the sex crimes, voyeurism in particular seems to bring out the ingenuity in its perpetrators. Lust impels guys who probably couldn’t fix a leaky faucet to conceive the most outrageous contraptions for peeping. Guys attach digital cameras to their shoes so they can photograph up girls’ skirts. They plant microscopic video recorders in toilet-paper holders, and then they hook up a wireless network to transmit the video to a computer somewhere. They buy all the latest spy tech and then risk life and limb crawling through air vents to conceal it somewhere.

But ingenuity is not identical to gadgetry, and a perp like the guy in this story comes along to show that you don’t have to be a master of Information Age technologies in order to do some good old-fashioned peeping. In the stead of miniature cameras, this guy used mirrors. Even more importantly, his whole scheme rested on a simple maneuver of what scam artists call “social engineering” — the signs redirecting women from their own bathroom to the men’s room. This was a simple but brilliant strategem. It did not raise women’s suspicions, as it might have if he, a man, had been trying to trick out the mirrors in the women’s room. And it didn’t raise men’s suspicions because honestly the fathers attending their daughters’ volleyball matches probably didn’t even think twice about it. “Huh? Bathroom’s broken? Guess I’ll go outside in the bushes.”

Furthermore, whether it was intentional or not, the fact that this perp confined himself to old-fashioned peeping methodologies will no doubt lessen the punishment he’ll eventually receive. Using mirrors instead of cameras means there’s no incriminating evidence at home, no possibility of kiddie-porn charges. It gives him the wiggle room to claim that he was only interested in the adults and not in the nubile young athletes using the bathrooms. It’s no wonder that, when his bail was set at quarter of a million dollars, he cried that it was too much. No doubt he felt that his old-fashioned methods should have earned him an old-fashioned bail, like something you can pay with indian-head nickels.

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