Paedophile Matthew Jenkins jailed
IT expert Matthew Jenkins, 35, accessed 3,184 images and 51 movies of boys and girls, some of whom were infants. And one of the more shocking movies he watched involved an animal, Bristol Crown Court heard.
It emerged that after his arrest last summer he failed to answer bail at Staple Hill police station and was circulated as a missing person. Two weeks later, officers found him hiding in the woods near his home in Clearwell.
Sentencing Jenkins to 14 months in prison, Judge Martin Picton said: "This is serious offending of its kind. The images and movies are of awful child abuse being perpetrated on innocent victims and you chose to access, download and keep some of this material, given your distorted thinking about it."
Richard Posner, prosecuting, said suspicions about Jenkins arose last July when a colleague at intY , an internet security company at Aztec West, opened a shared "route Lime Wire tunes" folder as he used a laptop computer to listen to his MP3 player. The folder contained a number of child porn images and movies.
The colleague told senior managers, who traced the origin of the folder to a computer usually used by Jenkins in his role as a systems administrator.
When confronted, Jenkins apologised and said it was a "moment of madness".
Police seized the hard drive, plus two others found at the 35-year-old's home and discovered they all contained child porn.
Mr Posner said: "He told police he needed help. He had been downloading images for a number of years.
"When he was on bail he did sleep rough and went missing, hiding in woods."
In mitigation, the court heard Jenkins had not paid for any of the child porn and was not a member of a paedophile network. He had no previous convictions and admitted 10 counts of making indecent images, with a further 3,174 counts taken into consideration.
Jenkins will be on the Sex Offenders' Register for 10 years and is disqualified from working with children for life.
He will also be subject to a Sexual Offences Prevention Order.
