Hanover Police are investigating reports from three women that a male Dartmouth student has been peeping into their windows during the early morning hours over the past several days.
Safety and Security officers stopped and questioned the male suspect early Wednesday but released him because "there was no direct evidence that he was a peeping Tom, so to speak," said Seargent Mark Lancaster of Safety and Security.
Safety and Security and the Hanover Police will not release the suspect's name because he is "not guilty of anything yet," Lancaster said. Safety and Security told the women the suspect is a College student who lives in Maxwell-Channing Cox, where the voyeurism was allegedly committed.
Lancaster said he was called to the Maxwell-Channing Cox apartments by James Durkee, a Safety and Security night patrolman, who spotted a young man looking into apartment windows.
As the security officers approached the loitering male, the suspect "accelerated towards the basement of Channing Cox," where he was stopped, Lancaster said. "He said he was out getting air," Lancaster added.
Shortly before Lancaster arrived on the scene, a woman living on the second floor of Channing Cox called Safety and Security to report a voyeur. A similar report was made Sunday night at about 10:30, when a woman said she saw a male peeping into her friend's first-floor Channing Cox window.
Detective Rick Paulsen of Hanover Police is investigating the case. Lancaster said he suggested the women turn the matter over to the Hanover Police.
The woman who filed the first report on Sunday said she first saw the suspect when she went next door to visit a friend. "I thought he was talking to her at first, because we talk through the windows to each other all the time since we live on the first floor.
"But he just kept loitering around. As soon as I got into her apartment I turned off all the lights of her bedroom and whipped open the drapes of one of her bedroom windows and he was back in her window staring in and he saw me open the window and then he ran away."
After the two reports were made to campus security and news of a possible suspect circulated through the apartments, another woman who lives on the first floor of Channing Cox called Safety and Security reported seeing a voyeur on two previous nights.
The women who reported the suspect asked not to be identified. Only one of the three women who filed a report said she saw the suspected voyeur clearly.
The College Handbook does not list a specific punishment for voyeurism.
