Jersey paedophile groomed UK woman to gain images of daughter

Thursday 06 April 2017

A “predator” who started a relationship with a UK woman to gain indecent images of her nine-year-old daughter has been sentenced to eight and a half years’ imprisonment.

Jersey-born Karn Damien Laffoley (42) pleaded guilty to 12 counts of possessing, making, distributing and advertising indecent images of children, and four of breaching a pre-existing restraining order for related sexual offences, in what was described as a highly “complex” case which brought together officials from the States of Jersey Police, UK Police, National Crime Agency and FBI.

Crown Advocate Richard Pedley, prosecuting, told the Court that Laffoley started an affair with the woman after meeting her on a dating site for which she had used a picture of herself and her daughter as a profile picture in early 2015.

Soon after meeting online, the pair began “extremely graphic” exchanges, with the woman having sent him a “level four” photograph – an image at the most serious end of the indecency scale – of her nine-year-old daughter within just ten weeks.

She told the Police at interview that she had sent him the images firstly at his instigation, but later due to her infatuation with him.

He told the Police that the images from the woman – who he had met in the UK on one occasion – were “thrown in his lap” and that he had deleted them soon after they were sent, but this was later found to be untrue.

Pictured: The Royal Court, where the sentence was delivered.

Laffoley had in fact distributed and advertised images of the woman’s daughter, which ended up on the “dark web” – a covert internet platform often used by paedophiles, drug dealers and terrorists – to interested parties in America, Germany and Russia. It is now unknown how far the images might have spread.

He was also found to have used the clandestine software to search and recover explicit material involving children between nine and 12, with hundreds of additional images of unknown subjects recovered from his iPhone, laptop, email accounts and Google Drive.

Throughout this time, Laffoley had been complying with Probation Services, having even attended a course to deal with his “addiction”. This was later discovered, however, to have been a “smokescreen” for his offending.

Described as a “serial recidivist”, the Court was told that Laffoley had been involved with child pornography since 1997 and sexual online message exchanges with children in which he posed as a teenage boy dating back to 2008, and that numerous attempts to help had not worked.

But Advocate Anderson, defending, said that Laffoley was ready to accept even the most “draconian” measures – including supervised internet usage – in order to combat his illicit predilection.

“Mr Laffoley accepts the gravity of his offending and knows that he must break the addictive cycle,” he commented.

Bailiff William Bailhache, who sat with five jurats, subsequently handed him eight and a half years’ in prison and a 15-year restraining order preventing him from being unsupervised with children under 16.

The Bailiff added in his closing remarks that he did not consider the woman who sent him the images to be a “victim”. She was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in a UK court.

Following the ruling, Detective Inspector Steve Langford said: “Laffoley is a dangerous man and it’s likely his behaviour would have continued if he hadn’t been caught. He not only got the woman to send him images of the child but he also then tried to trade these images with others, a charge which has never been used before in Jersey.”