New Westminster, British Columbia –
A hard drive seized from the home of the Dutchman accused of molesting British Columbia teenager Amanda Todd contained a deleted bookmark to child pornography depicting her, a Crown attorney told British Columbia Supreme Court on Friday.
Louise Kenworthy told Aidan Coban’s trial that previous expert testimony showed Todd’s name and several of the online aliases used to harass her were also found on a second hard drive seized when Dutch police arrested Coban in 2014.
Coban pleaded not guilty to extortion, harassment, communicating with a young person for the purpose of committing a sexual offense and possession of child pornography.
Kenworthy said he expected to finish the Crown’s closing arguments Tuesday, when he said he would talk about an online account that was active on a computer just five minutes before police arrested Coban at his home and then seized the device.
She said evidence showed the account was run by the same person behind another account, under the guise of a young woman who was harassing Todd.
There was no witness who said, “I saw Aidan Coban typing messages on his computer to Amanda Todd,” or that they saw Coban in possession of child pornography depicting the teenager, Kenworthy told the jury Friday.
But his guilt was the only conclusion the jury could draw from the testimony of more than 30 witnesses and binders filled with 80 pieces of evidence, she said.
She gave the jury testimony from a BC RCMP digital forensics expert who last month told the court about finding a folder with Todd’s name on it that had been deleted from a web browser on one of the seized devices.
The folder contained links to the Facebook profiles of a number of Todd’s friends, the official said.
The officer testified that he found evidence that several of the accounts used to harass Todd accessed social media platforms on the seized devices, she said.
Those accounts were active right around the time the Port Coquitlam teenager was being harassed and blackmailed, Kenworthy said.
The RCMP officer also testified that he found “actual chat fragments” between Todd and several of the online aliases on one of the seized devices, she said.
Kenworthy cited testimony that Coban lived alone in the home, from a childhood friend who helped him move in, and from the son of the owner of the bungalow park where the home is located.
At the start of the trial two months ago, Kenworthy told jurors that Todd was the victim of a constant campaign of online “sexual blackmail” for three years before her death at age 15 in October 2012.
The jury saw evidence that Todd’s abuser repeatedly demanded she do sexual “shows” on a webcam and carried out threats to send sexualized images of the teenager to her family and classmates.
Earlier this week, the jury was shown a Facebook post by Todd in which she expressed her fear that the man harassing her would continue for the rest of her life.
Todd urged people to block one of the abuser’s accounts, saying a “sick pedophile” was blackmailing her, Crown attorney Kristen LeNoble said.
The Crown also spent Thursday describing alleged links between Coban and Todd through a phone number, a passport photo and a video file bearing the teenager’s name.
Crown attorney Heather Gwin said one of the Facebook accounts used to harass Todd, who Facebook records and expert testimony linked to several other aliases, was registered to a cellphone number associated with Coban.
She recalled the testimony of two women who said they received the number in May 2011 while communicating with a man about renting an apartment in Rotterdam.
Both women told the court they met the man at the apartment and later received a passport photo depicting him, Gwinn said.
Police found a copy of the same photo while searching Coban’s home, she said.
Gwynn showed the photos in court and they appeared to show Coban.
Another Crown attorney, Marcel Daigle, cited earlier testimony from a Dutch police digital investigator who said a deleted video file called “AmandaTodd.wmv” was played on one of the devices seized in December 2010, which corresponds to the time when Todd was actively harassed.
Daigle said multiple devices found in Coban’s home had software described as an “anti-forensic” program used to delete files so they could not be recovered.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on July 29, 2022.
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