Harrogate paedophile is spared prison after completing rehabilitation programme

Andrew Wells, 59, from Harrogate, downloaded and viewed images of children as young as two years of age, York Crown Court heard.

Barrister Harry Crowson, for the prosecution, said police swooped on Wells’s home on April 13 after receiving intelligence about illegal activities on his computer devices.

Wells, of Rutland Road, was at work at the time where he was subsequently arrested. He handed over his mobile phone to police who seized several more electronic devices from Wells’s home including an iPad, desktop computer, a memory card and hard drive on which they found 1,413 indecent images of children.

Of those repugnant images, 173 were rated Category A – the worst kind of such material.

Mr Crowson said Wells had been downloading the depraved material for “at least” five years, between August 2015 and 2020.

On the iPad, police found the KIK app on which Wells had communicated with other paedophiles. His username on the app was “Captain Filth”. The messenger app was linked to an email account entitled “No Good Boy”.

Police found multiple conversations Wells had had with others which involved “fantasy of the most vivid sort” which was too “heinous” to be articulated in court.

“It appears that the KIK chats (involved) him and another egging one another on and gaining sexual satisfaction from their conversations,” added Mr Crowson.

Wells told his equally depraved interlocutor that he had pictures he could share with him “at another time”.

When the other man told him he would like pictures of 16-year-olds, Wells told him that “16 (was) a bit old for me”.

During the debauched online chats, Wells, who told the man he was living in the Netherlands, sent what appeared to be one single indecent image, accompanied by unprintable remarks about the child in question, but the prosecution said that many other images may have been deleted.

There were further chilling conversations with others on Skype in which Wells and his interlocutors appeared to come to a “mutual agreement” that they would delete the “spicier photos”.

Mr Crowson said there was an “incalculable number” of other images that were “deleted and couldn’t be recovered” in the Skype chat logs as Wells and the others had tried to “cover each other’s tracks”.

Wells had used encrypted-chat and “cleaning” software, as well as two “private-network apps”, to “hide or delete” the depraved material.

The private-network apps hid the identity and location of the user visiting the illicit sites, hence Wells’s claim that he was from Holland.

Tech-savvy Wells also used an app designed to hide user passwords on external hard drives, enabling the user to upload images and then “lock them, so nobody (else) could gain access”.

However, Mr Crowson said police had the technical tools to break through this “lock”.

Wells appeared for sentence on Thursday, December 8 after admitting three counts of making indecent images of children and one count of distributing an indecent image.

Defence barrister Sean Smith said Wells had “spectacularly lost his good character” but claimed his offending over the five years had been “sporadic rather than persistent”.

Since his arrest, he had completed a rehabilitation programme voluntarily and references from his employer spoke of how he was “valued within the work community and the good… he did for others in that business”.

Judge Sean Morris said it would have been “easy” to sentence Wells with “anger (and) emotion” after reading the “sickening” online chats, but this had to be tempered with the fact that Wells had only been charged with distributing one indecent image.

He noted that, after having “sunk to this”, Wells had taken steps to address his deplorable behaviour and helped to care for his elderly mother, which meant he could suspend the inevitable jail sentence.

Wells was given a 16-month suspended prison sentence and placed on the sex-offenders’ register for 10 years.

He was ordered to complete 300 hours of unpaid work and 40 rehabilitation-activity days. He was also made subject to a sexual-harm prevention order to curb his online activities.