A paedophile secretly hid a spy camera to record a schoolgirl getting undressed.



Sick paedophile hid spycam to secretly film schoolgirl and ‘get what he wanted’

A paedophile secretly hid a spy camera to record a schoolgirl getting undressed.

Police only discovered footage of the girl on David Brown’s computer when raiding his home in Hornsea last year after receiving intelligence he was downloading indecent images of children.

Brown, 55 – who has changed his name from Dale Lutkin – was found to have more than 3,000 indecent images on his computers after police seized a laptop and hard drive, Hull Crown Court heard.

Richard Thompson, prosecuting, said the images included one of a woman about to sexually abuse a ten-month-old baby girl.

When Brown was interviewed by police, he said he was “unsure whether or not he had a sexual interest in children, but accepted he’d been aroused by some of the material he’d seen”.

He said of the spy camera he “purchased the device for the specific purpose”, and recorded the girl “as he put it, ‘to get what he wanted’.

He accepted he had been downloading indecent material “for a number of years”.

However, the true scale of his offending may never be known as Brown had installed Eraser software on his equipment, which was “capable of deleting images so they are beyond the reach of police forensic software”, Mr Thompson said.

He had visited a “file-sharing platform”, and websites including “spotsofpurity”, which featured videos and films of child abuse, and “darkscandals” – which to access required users to submit a video or supply bitcoin, which then gave access to about 1,000 child abuse images.

In total, police found 82 images at category A – the most extreme – 276 at category B, and 2,886 category C images. There were 2,787 “unique” images and 365 unique videos.

Brown, now of Mill Lane, Pontefract, admitted voyeurism, taking indecent photographs, and three counts of making indecent photographs. He had no previous convictions. Although he has since “moved out of the family home”, his wife was among those who provided references for him.

Judge Mark Bury said: “It seems to me, egregious though these offences are, it’s difficult to see what more he could have done since the commission of them to put things right.”

Brown had worked with a number of charities including Safer Lives and The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, the court heard. Mr Brook invited Judge Bury to consider suspending any sentence of imprisonment.

But jailing Brown for 18 months, the judge told him: “I tell you now that’s simply impossible, Mr Brown.

The nature of this offending is such it would be totally failing in my duty to impose anything other than an immediate sentence of imprisonment.”

Brown was made subject to a sexual harm prevention order for ten years, and must register as a sex offender for the same period.