A plumber convicted of indecently recording a child in a public toilet block has walked away with a suspended sentence.
Phillip Anthony Best was caught recording the 15-year-old girl in a toilet block on Bunbury's Back Beach on October 8, 2022.
He was arrested and charged later that month.
After a five-day trial in the District Court this week, jurors took just under two hours to deliver a guilty verdict.
Judge Troy Sweeney imposed a 12-month jail term, suspended for 18 months, describing Best's offending at the "lower end" of sex offences.
Sex offender register
Best will be placed on the sex offender register and will be required to undergo impulsivity counselling.
A mandatory restraining order was also imposed, prohibiting Best from communicating with the victim or approaching her school and workplace.
Best's ADHD was also cited as a mitigating factor with regard to his offending.
"While ADHD is no excuse for what you did, I do concede this happened when you were in a tough place," Judge Sweeney said.
"It was an outrageous invasion of privacy, and I accept the impact the offence had on the victim."
Plumber filming from rafters
Throughout the trial, the court heard the 15-year-old victim had finished changing her clothes in a cubicle in the woman's section of the toilet block when she spotted a phone in the rafters pointed at her.
She approached two older teenagers to tell them about the phone, and they all left the block to investigate it.
The trio said they saw Best exit the adjacent maintenance room door.
The court heard the older girls approached Best to ask if he knew anything about the recording and claimed he said he did not, and that he denied he had a phone on him when asked.
Best denied this sequence of events and said he produced his phone immediately.
Best filmed from the rafters of this toilet block. (ABC South West: Georgia Loney)
The teenagers said Best was visibly shaken and seemed nervous during the interaction.
They said after being told the victim was just 15 years old, he produced his phone.
The older girls looked through his phone's camera library, while the victim filmed the interaction on her own phone.
The victim's own phone recording showed that while no images or videos were in his camera's library, there were some in his recently deleted folder.
The four teenagers claimed to have seen a video of what appeared to be the shoulders of a girl with dark hair and complexion in a locked cubicle.
The court heard the video in question had been deleted before police could see it.
Prosecutors honed in on 'lies'
The prosecution's case was built around the witness accounts of the 15-year-old victim, her boyfriend and the two older teenage girls.
Additionally, the court heard statements from a police officer friend of Best as well as his then wife, who claimed the defendant had confessed to recording the 15-year-old.
The prosecution asked the jury to focus on two lies they alleged Best had told, firstly, that he initially said he did not have a phone on him when asked.
The second, the court heard, which Best later admitted was a lie, was that he was in the maintenance room to check the pump.
Best will be sentenced later this year. (ABC South West WA: Sam Bold)
Best's defence was that there was no physical evidence of him recording the female block and that the image seen on Best's phone from the victim's own phone recording was of the male block.
The defence claimed the victim, her boyfriend and the two other teenage girls were unreliable witnesses who had convinced themselves of what had happened and had seen what they wanted to see.
The defence argued the conversations between Best his friend and his then wife were misunderstood, and that Best had not admitted to the incident but rather said he had been accused of it.