June 25--CHAPEL HILL -- John Thomas Whitt, Jr. has once again been charged with secretly peeping after a woman identified him Sunday night as the man she saw looking into her bedroom window as she was getting undressed.
Whitt, 60, has been in the news as a peeper in North Carolina since 2000, and because of his peeping activities involving a camera at sororities, especially in Chapel Hill, the N.C. General Assembly passed a law making it a felony to secretly photograph or videotape people in rooms.
Whitt was arrested at the Mill Creek Apartments at 700 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Chapel Hill about 10:40 p.m. Sunday, according to Sgt. Kevin Gunter of the Chapel Hill Police Department.
A woman at the apartment complex called 911 to report that she had just arrived home when she went into her room to undress and heard a noise outside of her bedroom window. When she looked out the window, she saw an older white male wearing glasses, and she immediately went into another room of the apartment to report what she saw, and her friends encouraged her to call 911, Gunter said.
Police arrived at the scene, and an officer spotted a man fitting the description between the "A" and "B" buildings. The officer called out to the man, but the man ran away, and the officer chased him.
"When the officer was about to grab him, he turned and tried to punch the officer," Gunter said.
Police did not find that Whitt had a camera, so he was charged with the misdemeanor of secretly peeping into a room and assault on a law enforcement officer. He was being held in the Orange County Jail under $1,500 bond.
Whitt was most recently in the news after he was arrested on Halloween night in Chapel Hill for videotaping up women's skirts during the downtown celebration. He was charged with a felony in that case.
Then in January, Chapel Hill police asked for the public's help in identifying three women who dressed as Christmas presents for Halloween. When police arrested Whitt on Halloween, they found that he had a videotape of three women getting dressed up for Halloween as Christmas presents, but investigators didn't know who they were.
Police needed to identify the women to ask them if they had given Whitt permission to film them in order to file charges against Whitt for the felony of secretly videotaping a person in a room.
"We did locate those victims," Gunter said. "Those charges are still pending."
Whitt, of 2089 Virgilian Road, Roxboro, is scheduled to appear in Orange County Criminal Court for those two felonies on July 10.
Whitt first made the news when he was caught videotaping a woman trying on clothes in the Kappa Delta sorority on East Franklin Street in 2001. He had climbed on a roof of the first floor of the sorority and was filming through a broken piece of blind into the room that was on the second floor.
Upon investigation, police found videotapes at his home in Roxboro and discovered 87 instances in which 29 women were secretly filmed in their rooms in the Chapel Hill area. Upon further investigation, police discovered he also had secretly videotaped women at N.C. State, Wake Forest and Duke universities. As the law stood then, police could only charge him with misdemeanors, and he was sentenced to just eight months in prison for all the charges.
After that, Assistant District Attorney Kayley Tabor, who worked in Orange County at the time, successfully lobbied the General Assembly to change the law to make it a felony to videotape people in a room without their permission.
Copyright 2012 - The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.
