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A 62-year-old man with a long record of sexual offences involving children and a “very significant underlying problem of character” has been handed an indeterminate sentence after an Ottawa judge declared him a dangerous offender.
“My role here is to protect society from Walter Starnaman sexually victimizing any more women or girls,” Justice Kevin B. Phillips of the Ontario Superior Court declared in his decision Friday.
Starnaman’s criminal history dates back to 1977 with a conviction of sexual interference involving a five-year-old girl in Barrie.
In 1980, Starnaman was convicted in Orillia for having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl with whom he was “dating." He was eight years older than her.
His criminal record of sexual offences involving girls, which eventually progressed to rape, accumulated as he travelled to Brampton, Toronto, Scarborough in the 1980s and early 1990s when he was finally held under the Mental Health Act.
In his latest interaction with the law, Starnaman was convicted in an Ottawa court of one count each of sexual interference and sexual assault involving a 10-year-old girl, which led to the dangerous-offender designation.
“Mr. Starnaman pursued a friendship with (a woman) in order to gain access to her daughter. His present position that he was merely trying to kindle a romantic relationship with (the woman) and that is how he came to be coincidentally babysitting (the girl) is simply untrue,” Phillips wrote in the decision.
That Starnaman insisted he was wrongfully accused and convicted informs the degree of his insight, the judge added.
Once he declared Starnaman a dangerous offender, the judge said his options were to send him to jail for at least two years, followed by a long-term supervision for a period of up to 10 years, or impose the indeterminate sentence.
The question, Phillips said, was whether the public would be protected from the convicted man.
“A court should impose an indeterminate sentence unless evidence specific to the offender satisfies the court that the offender can be rehabilitated within a determinate period of time,” he wrote. "The court is not entitled to gamble on the safety of the community.”
Phillips referred to testimony given in the earlier hearing by a forensic psychiatrist who said there is a reasonable possibility of eventual control of the offender’s risk in the community through the use of the drug Lupron to reduce the man’s sex drive and he suggested a treatment plan.
But the judge said even though Starnaman went through periods without offending, has taken the drug and attended treatment, he had a “tortured history” and the “motivation could not be sustained, and Starnaman sought out and victimized a child multiple times.
“It was after unilaterally ending this treatment that Mr. Starnaman engineered a situation where he could have regular private access to a child,” the judge wrote.
Phillips said he found it astounding that Starnaman told the psychiatrist that he felt he didn’t need the drug, but would take it if needed.
“Walter Starnaman has lived most of his adult life in and out of the penal and mental health systems, receiving punishments and quasi-punishments as a result of his problematic sexual orientation. One would expect in his current circumstances that he would be almost begging for Lupron and anything else on offer,” the judge wrote.
The latest assault didn’t just spontaneously happen, but was planned and deliberate, Phillips said. The judge added Starnaman can't be trusted and he can’t expect that Starnaman could keep himself in check, describing him as “untrustworthy and unreliable.”
Phillips said the indeterminate sentence means that Starnaman can be supervised for the rest of his life to ensure he doesn’t victimize any other children.
