Man banned from having bin bags at home due to fantasies about suffocating people with them

A bondage fetishist has been banned from having bin bags in his home because of his obsession with the idea of wrapping people up in polythene and suffocating them, a court heard. Warren Harris, 46, of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, is also barred from looking at online pictures and texts relating to people being vacuum packed. But when police did a routine check on Harris two months ago to ensure he was complying with a court order made in 2010 they found he had been looking at the kind of images and stories he is banned from seeing, Gloucester Crown Court was told. Harris admitted two offences of breaching a sexual harm prevention order imposed on him at the request of the police six years ago. Prosecutor Caighli Taylor told the court: "Police attended his address on July 18 this year. It was an unannounced visit and he consented to his mobile phone being checked. It showed he had been watching films on You Tube in relation to women being vacuum packed and aspyhxiated. Written stories relating to asphyxiation were also found.



"On August 10 he told the police he knew he had been viewing things which placed him in breach of his sexual harm prevention order. He admitted he had been looking at bondage footage showing the plastic wrapping up of people aged 17-18. He said he had been doing it twice a day for two hours at a time. He said he was sorry, he knew it was wrong but he enjoyed it." Stephen Ritter, for Harris, said: "He presents as a nice chap next door. But the reports on him obviously raise great concern. He is aware of the acute problem he suffers from. He seeks to co-operate. There has been no breach of the 2010 order until now. He is working hard at dealing with it but he feels he needs more support. I think it is extraordinary that this material was on YouTube. I would have thought this kind of character would have had to go underground on the Dark Web to find it." The judge, Recorder Robert Linford, said a suspended jail sentence was recommended in a pre-sentence report on Harris. But he said he was concerned that Harris was 'straying back into the world he inhabited a number of years ago.'

Recorder Linford said: "It has to be stopped. I am surprised that nothing more intensive than a 20 day rehabilitation activity requirement is being recommended." Mr Ritter said that Harris is trying to get himself referred by his GP to the Portman Clinic in London, which offers specialist long-term help people with disturbing sexual behaviours, criminality and violence. Det Con Emma Wilson, who works with the management of violent and sexual offenders in Gloucestershire, said: "The issue we have is his entrenched sexual behaviour in relation to plastic to point that we have had to have a contract with him in relation to bin bags. He can only have certain types of bin liners. He cannot have black bin bags in the house because they are a real concern. He needs more help to understand his sexual fetishes and address them. They will never go away so the risk will never go away and his thought processes will never go away. But he needs to be given the tools to manage his own risk. Incarceration is not ideal because he will lose his accommodation and when he comes out he will be a homeless high risk offender."



The Recorder said he did not believe locking Harris up would do any good in the long term and he was more interested in a long community order coupled with specific requirements. He decided to defer sentence on Harris for six months to see if, through his GP, he can get into the Portman Clinic for treatment which will help protect the public in future. "It seems to me everyone will be a lot better off if this defendant received that help," he said. "He wants it, he understands there is a problem and it is enormously to his credit that he confessed what he had been doing." The judge made a new lifetime sexual harm prevention order which includes a ban on using social media and deferred sentence till March 23 next year. He told Harris: "I am extremely troubled that you committed these offences in breach of your order. It was an enormously retrograde step in your life having made a great deal of progress in tackling the issues you have. In the next six months I expect you to strive to get a referral to Portman. That's a condition of deferral. It is a further condition that you do not commit any further offences." The Recorder told Harris that if he failed to meet the terms of the deferral he would get a long jail term. "I will lock you up and throw the key so far away that you will never find it," he warned. "I am giving you a chance. Don't blow it."