Paedophile pensioner called massive stash of child abuse images 'stolen art'

A paedophile pensioner compared his vast collection of indecent images of children to a 'piece of stolen art... you could put in a vault'. William Strowbridge spent 14 years hoarding 350,000 vile pictures and videos showing kids aged as young as three being raped, the Liverpool Echo reports.

After being caught red handed, the 70-year-old told police that he had 'stumbled across' the images and found them 'addictive'. Liverpool Crown Court heard that Merseyside Police identified an IP address which linked Stowbridge to the accessing of indecent images via BitTorrent and executed a search warrant at his home at around 8am on September 6 last year.

When arrested, Strowbridge - of Hartford Close in Prenton, Wirral - replied: "I stumbled across it and it was addictive."

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Oliver Saddington, prosecuting, described how a total of 14 electronic devices were seized from the property, with eight subsequently being found to hold illegal contents. This amounted to 742 indecent images in category A - those showing the most serious forms of abuse - as well as 620 in category B and 342,399 in category C.

Children shown in the pictures and videos were said to have been aged as young as three, with Strowbridge having been downloading them since November 2009. Under interview, he told detectives that he "had no explanation for his actions but felt an overwhelming sense of guilt".

The pensioner added that he "did not get sexual gratification from 99 per cent of the images" and said "it was like he had something that no one else had, like a piece of stolen art which he could not show anyone but could put in a vault and see