Serial paedophile jailed for ten years

Delivery driver Alan Potbury, 38, befriended a married couple and, having won their trust, offered to babysit their three children.

It was while he was looking after the youngsters that he repeatedly took pictures and recorded films on his mobile phone of him abusing a six-year-old girl, Bristol Crown Court was told.

Two years earlier he did the same to another girl, also aged six, whose family he had befriended.

James Ward, prosecuting, told the court that work colleagues recalled lewd comments he would make about customers.

“‘Alan was called Al the Paedo at work, they said’.

“I assume that people would call him this due to the comments he would make after coming back from his deliveries.”

Mr Ward said that, in 1993, Potbury accepted a police caution for indecently assaulting a teenage girl under the age of 16.

“That caution in 1993 was the start of a period in Mr Potbury’s life which culminated in these serious offences,” he said.

In 2001, Potbury began downloading vast quantities of child pornography and, by his arrest last year, had amassed a massive collection. But his most serious offending began when he became friends in 2004 with his second victim’s family, who live in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.