Child groomer denies downloading indecent images

Wednesday 22 July 2020

A man who already admits to grooming a 15-year-old girl is fighting a separate accusation that he also downloaded indecent images of children.

Leslie Thomas Bulpin (37) denied that he deliberately downloaded photos of children from a porn site at a Royal Court trial yesterday.

The Court heard that Police seized Mr Bulpin’s iPhone in May 2019 as part of another investigation. They found 2,050 adult images from the ‘X Videos’ porn site in the cache of his internet browser and 22 photos of what they judged to be children under 16, which is the legal age of sexual consent. Four of the images were classed as ‘Level Four’ on a five-tier scale of severity.

They also found that he had searched on three occasions for ‘little girls’ and other, more explicit, search terms referencing young people.

Pictured: The Court heard that Mr Bupin had searched explicit terms referencing young people on the pornography site.

Just days after the last indecent images were downloaded, Mr Bulpin made several calls to a 15-year-old girl, inviting her to his home for sex. The conversation was recorded and Mr Bulpin admitted a sexual grooming charge earlier this month. 

The Deputy Bailiff, Robert MacRae, allowed the two Jurats hearing the case, Collette Crill and Dr Gareth Hughes, to be made aware of the grooming attempt because of its relevance to the downloading charge.

Prosecuting, Advocate Richard Pedley said: “The defence case is that the downloading was inadvertent and the defendant had no knowledge of what would be downloaded, but that is not credible. Here, specific search terms were entered including ‘little girls.'

“We accept that his interests are not exclusive to young girls but that does not wash away the fact that he has a sexual interest in children, which is why he used those search terms. Not only did he anticipate what would be downloaded, but he was motivated to actively find indecent images. He knew the waters he was navigating.”

Defending, Advocate Adam Harrison argued that it was unlikely Mr Bulpin had seen any of the indecent images, which had been automatically downloaded to his phone.

“There is no evidence that he was computer literate, no evidence that he would know it would end up in the cache, and no evidence that he made any of the images in the cache,” he said.

He added: “The defendant only visited popular porn sites because he believed that they only used images of adults. There is no evidence that he visited illegal content sites or chat rooms; his activities were confined to the mainstream. Did he know when he carried out searches that they would bring up images of girls under 16? No, he was not looking for these and did not realise he had stumbled on any.” 

The trial is expected to conclude today.