A 56-year-old man who admitted to committing child sex offences in Burnaby and then breaching his bail conditions has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail and three years of probation.
Ronald Neale Gardner, pled guilty March 1 to making child pornography and arranging to commit a sexual offence against a child.
He also pled guilty to breaching bail conditions that prohibited him from having electronic devices with internet capability.
Gardner was arrested on March 10, 2016 at a Burnaby Whitespot where he had arranged to meet a woman and her two children – a boy aged 10 and a girl aged six – for the purpose of a sexual encounter involving all four.
The meeting was, in fact, a sting set up by the B.C. Integrated Sexual Predator Observation Team, and “Vicky,” the 45-year-old mother of two he’d been corresponding with for a month using internet chatrooms, had been a police officer.
Officers seized a number of items from Gardner’s truck including, hotel keys, a cell phone, two “My Little Pony” plush toys and a teddy bear holding a small vibrator.
A search of the hotel room revealed a computer, and the seized electronic devices were later revealed to contain the chat room correspondence.
Gardner was released on bail March 15, 2016, with conditions restricting his access to children, computer devices and the internet.
He was again arrested on April 4, 2016 after Abbotsford police found Gardner in his vehicle with a computer that had recently been connected to the internet and a server he had used during the sex crimes investigation.
This is the second time Gardner has been sentenced for a child-porn offence.
In September 2007, he was handed a one-year conditional sentence for possessing and distributing child pornography.
Child luring and child pornography both have mandatory minimum one-year sentences and a maximum punishment of 14 years in prison.
Gardner has already spent almost a year in jail and was credited for about a year and five months.
He will now spend another year and 11 months in prison before serving three years of probation with conditions around counselling, access to children and internet use.
B.C. Provincial Court Judge Nancy Phillips also imposed lifetime bans on Gardner’s access to the internet and to children.
“The circumstances of the offences and his prior record indicate Mr. Gardner constitutes a significant danger to children and that his contact with children should be limited,” Phillips stated in her March 14 ruling. “I also conclude this is one of those rare cases in which an almost total ban on internet access is required.”
Phillips called the grooming involved in Gardner’s luring offence “despicable” in that it involved a plan to “convince the mother to breach the sacred trust she had with her children so that he could ultimately be the beneficiary of direct physical gratification from the children.”
“While the offence involved fictitious children,” stated Phillips, “Mr. Gardner thought they were real given he went to the trouble of driving from the Okanagan to Vancouver where he rented a hotel room and planned to meet the three people at the White Spot. The fact the police found a sex toy attached to a teddy bear in his truck is a troubling indicator of the cognitive distortions employed by him.”
