A police expert has told a trial the phone of a man accused of flashing offences across Fife was at the scene of one of the crimes at the time it was committed.
Calum Martin, who specialises in using mobile phone data to trace the handset, said he had travelled to a number of locations in the Kirkcaldy area to see what phone mast signals could be picked up in them.
The information was then cross-referenced with Gavin Morrison’s phone data.
It showed a match between the location of an offence said to have taken place near an alley in St Kilda Crescent on October 29 2022.
It is alleged Morrison accosted two teenage girls and engaged in sexual activity by masturbating in their presence there.
Morrison, 44, says he was at home at the time and denies committing similar crimes over a period of seven years in Fife in the trial at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court.
Expert evidence
On the fifth day of the trial on Monday, Mr Martin said the “cell ID” of a mast accessible at St Kilda Crescent was logged by Morrison’s phone at around the time of the offence.
The cell ID of a mast near his home, where he claimed to have been, did not.
Asked what he could conclude from that, Mr Martin said: “The handset was at St Kilda Crescent at the material time and not at Gosforth Road.”
Mr Martin’s report also recorded the phone “in the vicinity of” a number of locations logged by police on CCTV as places they believed Morrison’s car had travelled to on the night.
However he acknowledged the technology has its limitations as it could not pinpoint an exact location for a specific mobile phone.
He conceded if his investigation had been carried out on a different day, the cell IDs logged at the given locations might differ but he “would expect most of the results to be the same.”
He said if there had been any hills or tall buildings that might have affected his investigation he would have noted them in his report.
Protected sister from flasher
Earlier, an 11-year-old girl said she “made a game” of a journey home to prevent her younger sister seeing a flasher.
The youngster was out with her sibling and a friend in August 2021 when they were accosted by a mask-wearing man.
The girl, who is now a teenager, said the trio spotted the man hanging around on some steps next to an underpass at Torbain, Kirkcaldy.
She described him as wearing a grey t-shirt, with his jeans pulled down.
She encouraged her sister to pedal her bike fast in a bid to distract her.
A pre-filmed interview was played to the trial of Gavin Morrison at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court.
The girl said her sister was cycling ahead of her and a friend, who were walking and talking.
“We got halfway past the stairs and (her friend) looked back because she heard a dog… then she was like ‘guys, that creepy guy’s just looking round the stairs at us’.
“We were about at the old play park and I looked back and saw the guy just standing at the bushes and he’s kind of playing about with his private area with his hands.
“I just looked forward and said to (the friend) ‘we need to pick up the speed a bit, that guy’s standing staring at us playing about’.”
She told her sister to show her friend how fast she could go “to make a new game because I didn’t want to worry her.
“So we picked up the speed and by the time I looked back he’s pulled up his trousers.”
The girls raced home to tell their parents.
Previous evidence
The court previously heard from a then-15-year-old left terrified by a masturbating man, naked except for sunglasses, a snood and shoes, who approached her at Rabbit Braes in July 2020.
Others said they had been approached by a flasher in cowboy boots while walking to the shops in Kirkcaldy.
A group of girls stopped a man chasing a group of youngsters on Halloween night in 2018, before fleeing in terror when they realised he was bottomless.
Another said she was followed from a youth club in Cowdenbeath in June 2019.
Some of the witnesses positively identified Morrison to police.
Morrison, 44, of Citron Glebe, Kirkcaldy, is variously accused of exposing his penis, masturbating in front of victims, committing an act of public indecency and conducting himself in a disorderly manner.
All the offences are said to have taken place in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, from 2015 up until October 2022.
Morrison denies all the charges and the trial continues.
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