How $600 Worth Of Equipment Put Perv In Erin Andrews' Hotel Room

It's only a matter of time before the cops and Chief Inspector Don Chavez crack this thing wide open. When they do, they'll find someone who needed $600 worth of gadgetry and a penknife to screw with Erin Andrews' life.

Earlier today, I sent a snippet of the video, still being passed around the internet like samizdat, to a helpful guy named Jon from Spy Tec Inc. in New York, a company that specializes in "the finest surveillance and detection equipment on the market today." He says the peeper was probably in an adjoining hotel room (not, as many people seem to think, on the other side of a peephole), having threaded a gooseneck or fiber-optic camera through a hole in the wall about a quarter-inch across. "I doubt the wall was concrete," says Jon, who asked me not to use his last name. "Any kind of sheetrock or plaster, you could use a penknife, if you have the time to do it."

"I think somebody was on the other side of the wall," he adds. "It's not like he put something in [in her room]. He's able to move the camera from her torso down, so somebody was doing it"

It's not an expensive operation, either. The camera wouldn't have cost more than $240, according to Jon. On the other side of the wall, it would've been hooked up to a digital video recorder that retails at $400, tops. This is horrifyingly basic equipment, cheaply purchased and easily operated.

"And if the person does it a lot," Jon says, a little ruefully, "it's not a big investment."