Mike on Crime

By Mike McIntyre
Winnipeg Free Press

A high-risk offender with a 20-year history of stalking unsuspecting women is headed back to jail after terrifying a Winnipeg teen outside a grocery store.

Brett Pilch, 44, pleaded guilty Wednesday to breaching conditions of his probation order by having unauthorized contact with a child. He admits to making sexually charged remarks to the 16-year-old stranger after they crossed paths in a downtown grocery store in November.

Pilch repeatedly told the girl she was “cute” and “sexy” and briefly followed her when she left the store. She ran back inside, crying, and told the owner what had happened. Police arrested Pilch after recognizing him on store surveillance video.

“I was doing so well out there. I should have known better,” Pilch said in court Wednesday. He was sentenced to five months in jail, in addition to the 75 days spent in custody since his arrest.

Defence lawyer Jody Ostapiw said her client immediately regretted his actions.

“He tells me he put his hand over his face and asked himself ‘What the hell did I just do?’” the lawyer said. “He knew that he’d just blown it.”

Pilch is well known to police officers in the sex crimes unit, who have been monitoring him closely since his last release from jail in May 2009. He has more than 40 prior convictions since 1990, including multiple counts of indecent phone calls and criminal harassment. His victims have included a woman he saw in a newspaper and tracked down, a woman he met in a shopping mall, several women across Western Canada he randomly found through the phone book and even a wrong number he dialled.

Pilch has a prior sexual assault conviction that involved grabbing a woman. He was given a two-year prison sentence in 1999 for stalking a woman while he was in prison serving a 35-month sentence for criminal harassment. Pilch terrorized the Winnipeg victim through a series of obscene letters and cards.

“It would be hard to find a more dangerous harasser offender… based on the satisfaction Mr. Pilch receives from causing terror to young women,” Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Perry Schulman said at the time.

Pilch was convicted in December 2005 of stalking a woman he spotted on a bus and was sentenced to 29 months jail. Police found he had also made several obscene phone calls to other victims. He was given statutory release from prison in July 2007 after serving two-thirds of his sentence. Pilch’s release was revoked in April 2008 when he was accused of following a 14-year-old girl. No additional charges were laid, but he remained in jail until June 2008.

Pilch was re-arrested weeks later after police found he had breached his probation by using a cellphone to secretly photograph the backsides of several Winnipeg women. He had also snapped pictures of a lingerie catalogue.