Is William Field living near you? He is back in your community to resume his paedophile ways.
A man had more than 420,000 images and films of child sexual abuse, along with about 1.3 million more images that police neglected to classify or check.
The youngsters engaged ranged in age from infants barely a few months old to teens. William Field had also sold a sex offender thousands of obscene pictures for £200.
A judge sent the 54-year-old to prison, stating some of the photographs he had gathered were “depraved beyond belief”.
Police carrying a search warrant at Field’s house in May 2020 revealed the crime, according to Swansea Crown Court.
While Sophie Hill, the prosecutor, said the defendant was absent for the search, authorities took several electronic devices from his property. First, looking at the gadgets, sometimes called “triaging,” found obscene photos. Arresting the prisoner, police visited his place of employment.
Field claimed that he had “thousands of images,” but officers were to find a “vast quantity” of images and films numbering more than 1.7m.
Police saw and categorised 424,401 indecent photographs, with 4,307 in Category A – demonstrating the most severe sorts of abuse – another 4,328 in Category B, and 415,766 in Category C, Miss Hill said. She stated police came upon another 1.3m pictures but did not view or classify them.
The prosecution said the Category A photographs showed babies up to youngsters aged three. As an illustration of the kind of material included, one of the movies showed an unhappy lad aged between 12 and 24 months being subjected to “sadomasochistic acts”, including rape and faeces. Estimated to be between 11 and 15 years old, the eldest youngsters under maltreatment appeared in Category C photographs.
On the defendant’s gadgets, police also discovered photographs of so-called adult “extreme pornography” displaying acts of bestiality involving a dog. Over ten years had passed since the pictures were downloaded.
Miss Hill said they discovered Field had aggressively looked online for obscene photos, using a Tor internet browser extensively to obtain files from the dark web.
Colleagues of Bedfordshire Police contacted Field the force following Dyfed-Powys Police’s arrest, informing them of contacts they had discovered between the defendant and a guy they had detained called Jamie McPherson.
According to the prosecutor, McPherson had mailed Field a computer hard drive containing obscene photographs onto which he uploaded before shipping it back. The two men had discussed child sexual assault. She added police discovered another 98,000 photographs they had not verified on the hard drives of Categories A, B, and C, as well as more than 55,000 pictures of child violence. McPherson gave Field £200 for pictures, and the transaction was confirmed in a text conversation between the two.
William John Field, of Queen Street, Aberystwyth, had earlier entered a guilty plea to possessing and distributing obscene photos of minors of Categories A, B and C and to possessing extreme pornography when he stood in the dock for sentence. Though none are of the same sort, he has eight past convictions for 13 offences.
For Field, Peter Warne said it seemed the defendant had an “addictive personality” and perhaps had substituted his alcoholism with another kind of addiction.
Along with getting therapy from the Lucy Faithful Foundation, which deals with sex offenders, he said his client “accepts that he has a problem and accepts he needs help”.
The attorney said Field “has given his time to help others” in the community and pointed to many references turned in to the court, one from a local councillor.
During his 25 years serving in the crown court, Judge Paul Thomas QC claimed the volume of photographs discovered on Field’s devices was the highest he had come across.
He told Field that his need to masturbate over such photos “fuels the evil trade,” and the Category A pictures the defendant downloaded depicted abuse that was “depraved beyond belief”.
He also questioned if the councillor who penned the reference knew the kind of photographs Field had been gathering.
The judge sentenced the defendant to two years and four months in jail following the sentencing guidelines and providing the necessary one-third discount for his guilty pleas.
Before being released on licence under the early release arrangement, Field will spend up to half that period in detention. Made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order to restrict his internet connection for the same duration, the defendant will be on the sex offenders registry for the next ten years.