Bail reduced for voyeurism suspect
A physician accused of being a voyeur made his first appearance in Kootenai County 1st District Court on Monday afternoon – by video link from the county jail – on four charges of violating a new Idaho law against video peeping and a fifth charge of sexual battery against a minor.
William Fouche, 58, answered “Yes sir” as 1st District Court Magistrate Judge Robert Burton read out the charges one by one and asked if Fouche understood them.
Burton reduced the physician’s $1 million bail to $10,000 cash and signed an order prohibiting Fouche from having any contact with five women named in the criminal complaints and from allowing any woman, except family, to enter his Post Falls home.
Fouche, who became a widower in September 2002, is accused of installing a camera in the bathroom of his home and secretly videotaping “persons known to the defendant and guests in his home,” as they undressed or showered, Kootenai County chief deputy prosecutor Lansing Haynes said Monday.
The criminal charges name five victims, including a 17-year-old whose breasts and/or genitals were videotaped. Fouche faces a sexual battery charge for allegedly taping the girl. The four counts of video voyeurism involve making secret videotapes of adult women.
Fouche recently left Post Falls Family Medicine, where he worked for 27 years, and was arrested on the criminal charges Sept. 10 in Hattiesburg, Miss. Also on Sept. 10, a lawsuit on behalf of 10 women who said they were victims of peeping by Fouche, was filed in Kootenai County court seeking damages of $10,000 or more.
The criminal case is the first filed under a new Idaho law, passed in March, making it a felony to videotape a person “without their knowledge or consent, in a place where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, with the intent of arousing … sexual desires.”
On Monday morning, Kootenai County Sheriff’s Det. Jamie Kimball arrested a 42-year-old Hayden landlord under the same new law, sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Ben Wolfinger said.
A woman who rented a room from Roger D. Hills complained to police at 5:30 a.m. Monday after she found a videotape containing footage taken of her in the home’s bathroom. She turned the tape over to deputies. Investigators, armed with a search warrant, recovered a camera and recording equipment from the home, Wolfinger said.
The new law “allows us to file charges when the people whose pictures are taken are adults,” Haynes said Monday. “Sexually explicit pictures of juveniles have always” been a felony, Haynes said, but prosecution for secretly taping or photographing adults often fell under misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges.
A deputy at the Kootenai County Jail said Fouche was still in custody as of Monday evening. The doctor faces a preliminary hearing on the charges by mid-October.
No specific court date had been set Monday.