Child porn stash found on disks

Fredrick Rock Winter, 63, was arrested in January 2010 after his home in the village of Upton near Gainsborough was raided by police.

Phil Howes, prosecuting at Lincoln Crown Court on Monday this week, said Winter’s computer was seized along with a number of disks.

A total of 193 indecent images of children were found on the computer with a further 1,143 saved onto disks.

Mr Howes said the images featured toddlers as young as 12 months old.

More than 400 of the images were classified in the two most serious categories.

And some of the videos were up to half an hour in length.

Winter later claimed he had initially innocently accessed the images, but then saved them onto disks.

Winter, of Main Street, Upton, admitted five charges of making an indecent image of a child and two charges of possessing a total of 1,336 indecent images on 18th January 2010.

He was given a three year community order with supervision and ordered to attend a sex offender rehabilitation course.

Judge Sean Morris told Winter he would have gone straight to prison but for the delay of two and a half years in bringing the case to court.

The judge said: “I would dearly love to lock you up but I’m afraid that after two and a half years it would probably be an affrontage to justice.”

“I feel my hands are tied.”

“If you had come before the court at the proper time you would have served your sentence by now.”

Ian Groom, defending, described the prosecution as ‘the simplest of cases’ but despite that it was two years before Winter was even charged.