B.C. pedophile dubbed 'Swirl Face' sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison

Convicted pedophile Christopher Neil leaves Richmond Provincial court in Richmond, B.C., Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012. (Jonathan Hayward / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. -- A pedophile who digitally disguised his face in child pornography will spend longer in prison than recommended by the Crown after a B.C. judge noted that Christopher Neil repeatedly harmed his victims by posting their images online.

Neil, 41, was sentenced Wednesday to 5 1/2 years after pleading guilty to five child-sex crimes that occurred over a 10-year period in Cambodia, Vancouver and Maple Ridge, B.C. The Crown had recommended a five-year sentence.

When time served is taken into account, Neil must serve just over 14 more months.

Justice John Harvey of the B.C. Supreme Court said the two boys shown in the images were victimized when photos were taken and when those images were posted on the Internet.

"Mr. Neil himself was a participant in some of the images of child pornography and therefore was instrumental in the children's victimization," he said.

"Mr. Neil posted the images taken of John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 onto the Internet, thus further victimizing them each time those images were subsequently viewed."

Outside court, Neil's lawyer said the punishment was harsher than his client had hoped.

"But that's the way it is sometimes," Mark Thompson said. "He's said also he's making a concerted effort to get treatment to change. He told everybody that asked ... that he was remorseful and we'll go by his word on that."

Thompson had asked for a sentence of time served, arguing further incarceration wouldn't help with Neil's rehabilitation or reintegration.

Neil initially faced 10 charges including producing images in Cambodia. He pleaded guilty in December to two counts of sexual interference in Cambodia in 2003, one charge of possessing child pornography in Maple Ridge in 2007 and two charges of accessing child pornography in Vancouver in 2013.

The sentencing concludes an investigation that began in 2004 and spanned two continents. Some of the convictions come under Canada's rarely used child-sex tourism laws.

Twelve years ago, German police discovered obscured images of a man sexually abusing two young boys in a hotel in Cambodia. Experts unscrambled his blurred face in 2007, prompting a global manhunt of a man the international media dubbed "Swirl Face."

Neil was arrested in Thailand and jailed almost five years for molesting two boys on unrelated charges, before returning to Canada in 2012 on an early pardon.

But Neil was not prosecuted for the notorious images until Canadian investigators built new evidence against him.

He was jailed in 2014 after breaching orders prohibiting him from possessing a laptop. Vancouver Police subsequently discovered child porn and matched the evidence with thousands of images seized from Neil's family storage locker and that set off the investigation in Cambodia.

Investigators with B.C.'s Integrated Child Exploitation Unit tracked down one of the victims, who said he was about 13 years old at the time.

In sentencing Neil, Harvey read a statement from the boy where he revealed he kept the incident to himself.

"Had I told anyone, I would have been ashamed of myself," the boy said in the statement.

"It's been over 10 years and I feel much less of a burden and it's water under the bridge. The day the police knew about it, they gave me my own picture. I felt very sad."

Neil was also sentenced to three years' probation and an international travel prohibition. He is banned for five years from using electronic devices capable of accessing the Internet. He will be nationally registered as a sex offender and is barred from visiting places like parks and community centres.

Brian McConaghy, a former RCMP forensic scientist who gathered key evidence in Cambodia, said the judge's decision to lengthen Neil's sentence is a step in the right direction.

"The judge did a good job today of addressing the gravity of what has been done to defenceless children overseas who do not have the social services available that children have here," said McConaghy, who runs the Ratanak International, a charity that works with former child-sex victims.

"Obviously when you work with child victims, there's no sentence big enough."