Dys: Ex-janitor sentenced in York County YMCA voyeur case

Through Spring 2013, John Ross Eddy woke before dawn every day to unlock the doors at the YMCA sports complexes in Lake Wylie and Tega Cay.

He would gladhand other employees at the Y, where he worked as a janitor, chuckle and chat with the hundreds of women coming in to get dressed in locker rooms before workouts.

Turns out, the smile was a lecherous leer.

For almost four months – from March to June 2013 – Eddy tucked tiny hidden video cameras in the women’s shower room and in a toilet stall so he could watch and keep recordings of women at their most vulnerable and private moments.

Eddy himself is seen on some of the videos seized by police, hiding the camera in a toilet roll dispenser, above a toilet, under a sink, then walking away as if he were doing nothing wrong.

No children were videotaped.

On Tuesday, Eddy, now 60, was sentenced to nine years in prison for crimes that threatened to wreck families and lives, crimes that Circuit Court Judge Lee Alford said “cannot be tolerated” anywhere.

Eddy, a man without any criminal record before he was charged with crimes that caused panic for the victims, also must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Nobody had to tell his victims that John Ross Eddy is a sex offender. Many looked right at him in court on Tuesday. A few shuddered with grief. Some had been captured on video two, three, even more times as they showered, put on make-up, combed hair.

One camera was placed right below a sink, at belt level, where a woman would lean in to get her mascara right in the mirror above.

For the first time Tuesday – 15 months after Eddy’s secret taping scheme unraveled when a YMCA member dislodged one of the hidden cameras and the law swooped in – many of the victims for the first time saw the real John Ross Eddy in action. The Herald is not naming the victims.

Of the 36 known victims, about a dozen were in court. Many clutched husbands’ arms. Three used words to describe what Eddy did as “sick” and “without an ounce of regret,” how he was “outgoing and friendly” and “seemingly genuinely nice” – while at the same time “victimizing” women who exercised and swam at the YMCAs.

These victims talked in court, and wrote letters that were read in court, about Eddy’s “offensive” behavior that stole not just their trust in public places, but their most private moments. Other victims were just too ashamed even to go to court – the shame not their own doing, but dropped like a bomb on them and their families by a voyeur.

“It was offensive not only that he put the cameras up,” said one of Eddy’s victims, a YMCA employee, “but that he made friends at the same time.”

All of the victims demanded prison time for Eddy, who was fired from the YMCA after his arrest – long after the damage had been done.

Robin Eddy spoke emotionally in court of how her husband’s acts were out of character, and that she still loves him. She spoke just feet from women who shrank back in their courtroom bench seats from a man who took away their trust and feeling of safety and security.

Eddy’s lawyer, Jim Boyd, talked of a father of five who had been an opera singer, a textile executive, an insurance agent and a cancer survivor, a man whose finances were careening toward bankruptcy, forcing him to take the YMCA janitor’s job.

A psychiatrist who began treating Eddy two days after his arrest spoke in court of how Eddy knew what he was doing was wrong, that he knew he would get caught – calling Eddy’s voyeurism a “personal, career and family suicide attempt.”

Still, the psychiatrist said, Eddy is not a sexual predator.

His victims had to listen to testimony that made Eddy out as some kind of victim of himself, that Eddy sought an answer to being broke by watching tapes of women taking showers at the YMCA.

After pleading guilty to 36 counts of voyeurism – peeping and recording for sexual gratification – Eddy turned toward the victims who had the courage to face him in a public courtroom and said he was “sincerely sorry.”

“I had no right to do what I did, and I wish I could undo it,” Eddy told his victims, a picture taken from the videos of him leering as he installed the cameras last year projected onto the courtroom wall over his head.

Eddy then made what had happened all about himself in an effort to avoid prison time with probation, so he could move to Connecticut and help his elderly in-laws.

“I want to be the person I used to be,” he told Judge Alford. “I’d like to have a second chance to be the person I can be.”

Facing anywhere from probation to life in prison – each of the 36 counts carries up to three years in prison – Eddy never mentioned how he had set up the cameras and kept the recordings so he could watch them later at home.

He just wanted to go to Connecticut and make like it never happened.

But Erin Joyner, the 16th Circuit assistant solicitor who handles many of York County’s sex cases, balked at Eddy’s claims of victimhood. After Eddy’s arrest in June 2013, police found a second camera that Eddy had not told police about.

Eddy, she said, must go to prison.

“Mr. Eddy got away with this for three months – that we know about,” Joyner told Alford. “He bought the equipment. He had the extra batteries. He saved the footage. And then he did it over and over again. He committed many, many crimes, against many of the women in York County.”

Alford, a judge in Probate Court, Family Court and Circuit Court for three decades, then stood up for Eddy’s victims. He looked squarely at the victims that Eddy barely glanced at, and Alford did not flinch.

Eddy’s reckless actions “wrecked his (own) life,” Alford acknowledged, but he made it clear that the sentence had to reflect what Eddy “did to these many victims.” He also mentioned how Eddy had hurt another victim – the YMCA itself.

Justice in this case, Alford said, also means “sending a message to anyone else” who might consider making a homemade peep show, that justice will drop like a wrecking ball from a crane.

When Alford handed down the nine-year sentence, John Ross Eddy never looked at his victims. He just shuffled off to a holding cell to start his time in prison.

As the victims made their way out of the courtroom, many holding onto husbands, one seemed to sum up the morning’s proceedings for all of them.

“He deserved what he got for what he did to us – and he deserved more.”