Motel owner spent 30 years spying on his guests' sex lives, considered himself a "researcher"

Not really. That would be a feature, not a bug. The point of statutes of limitation is to make sure that legal action or the threat of legal action doesn’t drag out to the detriment of the defendant’s ability to defend himself. That presupposes that there is a threat of legal action to defend against, and that threat doesn’t exist until the discovery of injury.