Once treated solely as crimes of annoyance, this behavior increasingly has become recognized during the past decade as serious and potentially dangerous sexual deviancy.
Escalating criminal activity is a legitimate issue for Peeping Toms, said Louis Schlesinger, a forensic psychologist at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has written numerous articles and books about sexual and other types of crime.
"Nobody wakes up one day and kills somebody or robs a bank," he said.
Burglary is a typical next step for peepers, Schlesinger said. His research into sexual murderers showed the escalation as a trend.
Of 52 such murderers he studied, 42 percent had a history of burglary. Of those, 68 percent burglarized for voyeuristic reasons while the remainder broke in for fetish-based reasons, such as theft of underwear.
Examples of escalating behavior have been well noted in the Fox Valley.
Jamie Lee Sames of Shakopee, Minn., faces charges in Outagamie County related to the sexual assault of a child in March outside Fox River Mall in Grand Chute. Sames was found guilty in 2005 in Minnesota of misdemeanor interference with privacy, that state's Peeping Tom law. He climbed a ladder and looked into a neighbor's bedroom window.
Allen K. Umentum of Sturgeon Bay will go to trial June 2 on an accusation of stalking a college student last year in Green Bay. In 2008, Umentum was convicted on two misdemeanor counts of invasion of privacy after he sneaked into the dorms at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and spied on female students as they showered.
In 2003, Todd Meverden of the Town of Neenah was sentenced to 120 years in prison for a series of burglaries and sexual assaults in Winnebago County during the spring and summer of 2002. Police said Meverden's crimes escalated over a three-year period from window peeping to stealing women's underwear before finally reaching the level of break-ins and sexual assault.
Generally, law enforcement hasn't fully caught up with research showing that voyeurism— activity that is sexual in nature but doesn't involve touching — should be taken seriously, Schlesinger said.
Often, he said, detectives will search for suspects in sexual murders among those on sexual offender registries. Burglary and peeping history is often far more relevant.
