A court heard that Gerrard Charnley was found in possession of so much child abuse material that police struggled to identify it all after it was recovered from his home in Widnes
A pervert who boasted about being a “proud paedophile” uttered five words of callous acknowledgement after sick passages from his diary were read out in court.
Police struggled to quantify the extreme amount of child abuse content collected by Gerrard Charnley, 52, who trawled the dark web in search for pictures and videos. Charnley, of Coronation Drive in Widnes, developed a “compulsive obsession” with the material and downloaded hundreds of thousands of indecent images and videos.
He documented his desires in sickening detail in a personal journal titled “my paedophile diary”, in which he named girls he wanted to “rape some day”. And when sentenced by a judge presiding over his trial for his possession of the abuse material, the offender issued a five-word statement of admission.
The Liverpool ECHO reports that Liverpool Crown Court heard Charnley collected 15,081 pictures and 2,308 videos graded as category A, meaning they showed the most serious forms of abuse, including babies being raped. Charnley was also found to have downloaded a further 17,383 category B images and 169,968 category C images.
He also had in his possession nine computer generated prohibited images of children, and an additional nine extreme pornographic images. Police were unable to categorise an additional 230,000 images due to the sheer volume of material on his devices. Prosecutor Sarah Holt said he documented the images in his journal “My Paedophile Diary”.
She told the court the document “contained references to specific dates and what the defendant wanted to do to particular children”, with one entry from June 2016 naming one girl he wanted to “rape some day very soon”. He added in the entry: “I’m proud to say this as a paedophile.”
Among other entries in the diary were a list of his favourite websites for viewing child abuse content, and a list entitled “preteen s**gs I’d love to rape”. Charnley admitted possession of indecent images of children, three counts of making indecent images, possession of prohibited images of children, possession of extreme pornographic images and possession of a paedophile manual.
He was jailed for 14 months on Thursday, January 2, handed a 10-year sexual harm prevention order, and told to sign the sex offenders’ register for the next decade. Nodding as he left the dock, having been told he would go to prison, he said: “I’m guilty. I’m sorry, ok.” Sentencing Charnley, honorary Recorder of Liverpool Judge Andrew Menary KC said the content he accessed was “truly shocking”.
He told the court: “There were so many images, something approaching half a million, recovered from your devices. I am told that there are 232,000 images which remain uncategorised, such was the sheer scale of the task. It is safe to say that your collection of images was enormous by any standard.
You appear to have been keeping a diary of the sorts of things you would like to do to children. They are horrific. They may well be you playing out your fantasies in writing, but they demonstrate the depraved, perverted nature of your desires and your reason for accessing all of this material.
“This written material demonstrates clearly that yours was not an idle obsession, but one where you were fixated on the abuse of children. It is trite to observe that while you yourself did not generate these images, your accessing of them and collecting of them develops a market for this sort of material.
“It is trite to observe that while you yourself did not generate these images, your accessing of them and collecting of them develops a market for this sort of material.” The judge concluded: “I am satisfied that only an immediate term of imprisonment is appropriate to deal with offending of the scale and type described in this case where you have quite deliberately, over many years, sought out and collected a huge quantity of appalling material.
“Alongside that you have generated your own material, demonstrating that you have a clear desire to participate in the abuse of these children.”
