Man jailed for hoard of 250 movie clips and 23,000 pictures of children

West Yorkshire officers visited the home of Johnathan Bradshaw in Heckmondwike in 2008 after information was passed to them by the Metropolitan police which showed he had paid $80 (about 54) a month for 10 months to see abusive images.

Jonathan Devlin, prosecuting. told Leeds Crown Court yesterday three laptops were seized and half a million images and films were found on them which had to be sifted through.

At the end of many weeks work it was found that 23,115 still images were indecent, including 662 at level 4 and 154 at level five, on a scale of one to five where five is the most serious.

It was also found that 244 movie clips were indecent including 77 at level four and five at level five, one up to nine minutes in length showing child abuse. Bradshaw accepted he looked at images for his own sexual gratification.

It was also found he had superimposed the picture of some girls he knew on to some of the images. Bradshaw, 41, recently of Moorgate Drive, Kippax, Leeds, was jailed for 16 months after he admitted 21 offences of making indecent images of children.

Sentencing him, Recorder of Leeds Judge Peter Collier QC said he accepted Bradshaw was of previous good character but the offences came at the top end in terms of the huge number of such images in his possession.

"In addition to the large numbers of images you have accepted you were obtaining these through sites using a subscription and that was going on at least 10 months because that was the period you had paid for access." He said it was a worrying feature that Bradshaw had manipulated some of the photos to impose images of other girls.

Mr Devlin told the court that when Bradshaw was interviewed he admitted using a number of different search engines and bulletin boards to download the images and had kept them in a folder hidden from his then partner.

Antony Farrell, for Bradshaw, said after his arrest that partner had ended their relationship when he frankly admitted to her what he had done and that led to him moving out.

He had started looking at such sites after they popped up when he was looking at adult pornography. He now felt repulsed by what he had done.

He had never shared them with anybody else and had suffered during the delay while on bail during the investigation having been made bankrupt.