PORT ANGELES – A 37-year-old Port Townsend man was sentenced Wednesday in Clallam County to 10 years in prison for felony stalking and 5 years for felony cyberstalking, to run concurrently; the maximum sentence for each count.

Fraser Rotchford is described as having a long, disturbing history of harassing women in Clallam and Jefferson Counties, and his case was handled jointly by prosecutors from both counties.

We asked Jefferson County Prosecutor James Kennedy why Rotchford received such an exceptional sentence.

“This has been going on for a really long period of time and he makes a lot of people feel very unsafe and I think this is reflected in the judge’s sentence. The way I’ve described it to people is that, like, he just randomly imprints on certain woman like a baby duck and he just fixates on them after that and cannot let go. He has spent nearly five of the past 10 years in jail or prison for related charges and none of that has ever stopped him. Even while he was sitting in the Clallam County Jail awaiting trial for this case, he was still writing letters to his victims. There’s nothing that will stop him and he does not care. He has no empathy for them.”

The trial in August was marked by frequent outbursts and disruptions by the defendant and included testimony from four victims, two of whom worked in the criminal justice system.

“So he originally got in trouble for stalking and harassing other people, and of course he came to court on those charges and then he saw a female prosecutor there, and I don’t even think she was working on his case. Started stalking her, gets in trouble, goes to jail. There was a female corrections officer, started stalking her because he saw her at the jail.”

One victim testified how Rotchford had started stalking her in 2011 when she was the owner of a small business in Port Townsend. She said he used to wait outside her business, would repeatedly call her, write her letters, contact her on social media, and follow her around town. She was ultimately forced to close her business and move to the east coast.

Kennedy talked about why it can be so difficult to get a conviction of this kind, but also why these cases are so important to pursue.

“Stalking, as it’s written under Washington state law, is one of the most difficult crimes to prove. It is an exceptionally difficult crime to prove. It’s like psychological warfare. It can get physical, but when it’s physical we start charging other crimes. So assuming that there’s no physical violence taking place, it really gets inside people’s heads and can really ruin lives, you know. I mean it’s amazing the way that these actions can simply just transform people. When they suddenly think they’re being watched and followed all the time it’s really ruinous to individuals.”

Judge Brent Basden ordered that Rotchford serve the maximum term of 10 years without probation. The Court also ordered him to pay a $500 victim’s fee and entered an Anti-Stalking No-Contact Order preventing him from contacting his victims.