York pensioner jailed on child sexual abuse image charges for the third time
A York pensioner has been jailed yet again after police found he had been viewing indecent images of children while subject to a strict court order to curb his internet activities.
Barry Hepworth, 76, was visited by monitoring officers on September 29 to check on his internet use.
They arrested the convicted sex offender after suspecting he had illegal images on his phone, York Crown Court heard.
Hepworth then pointed to his bed and said: “There’s a laptop under there; I got it years ago.”
Prosecutor Michael Cahill said that Hepworth, of Fourth Avenue, was subject to a sexual-harm prevention order which forced him to declare any internet-enabled devices to police and make them available for inspection.
He said police had been unaware of the laptop, which put Hepworth in breach of yet another court order relating to online imagery of children.
While Hepworth was in custody, police searched his home again and found another mobile phone in a rucksack hanging from a door. The Samsung phone had also not been made available for inspection, in contravention of the order.
Hidden laptop
Hepworth was charged with two breaches of the prevention order and admitted both offences. He appeared for sentence via video link on Thursday after being recalled to prison on licence.
Mr Cahill said that following Hepworth’s arrest, the pensioner told police he had hidden the laptop under his bed because he was “fed up of police being involved in his life”.
Hepworth told officers there would be indecent images of children on the phone they had seized.
The pensioner had five previous convictions for 33 offences all related to the possession, downloading and distributing of indecent images of minors, as well as breaching the associated court orders.
In 1993, he was given a five-year jail sentence for gross indecency with a child, indecent assault and attempted sexual intercourse with a girl under 13 years of age.
In 2016, he was jailed for two years for making and distributing indecent images of children and slapped with a sexual-harm prevention order of which he was now in breach.
In 2019, he was fined for a previous breach of the order and later that same year he was imprisoned for three years for possessing or making indecent images.
Deliberate breaches
Alex Menary, mitigating, said Hepworth was in poor health but conceded that “these are plainly deliberate breaches (of the order)”.
Judge Simon Hickey said they were “serious breaches” and that Hepworth had “yet again” been viewing indecent images of children.
Jailing him for 16 months, he told the pensioner: “The more people like you view such images, the more youngsters are going to be abused and put on the internet.”