Jail for man with nearly 8,000 indecent images of children

Monday 10 September 2018

A 73-year-old man has been jailed for four years after police officers found more than 7,900 indecent images and movies on his laptop.

Graham Thomas Storer appeared in the Royal Court today facing one charge of making indecent photographs of children.

The Court heard that Jersey Police searched the house Storer shared with his partner after receiving intelligence in May 2018. They seized a number of electronic devices including a laptop which belonged to Storer. During a preliminary inspection of the laptop, a Detective Constable from the High Tech Crime Unit found thousands of indecent images and videos. 

Storer admitted all the images were his, adding that his partner, with whom he lived, was "totally innocent." He said his partner was not aware of his child pornography preferences and was shocked to discover what he had been doing.

Storer confirmed he had an interest in gay pornography and that he had became interested in younger and younger boys, aged 10 to 12, in the past five years. He denied paying for the images but admitted he had exchanged them with people he contacted through the websites he used. 

He said he kept the images on an online storage to access them from different locations. He said that collecting images was like "trainspotting" and a bit like drug, stating: "You get sort of sucked into it."

Crown Advocate Richard Pedley told Court that a total of 5,166 indecent images and 2,744 indecent movies were found on Storer's laptop, some of them described as as the most serious material. The Detective Constable concluded that due to the "sheer volume" of indecent images found on the laptop and "the deliberate action of both soliciting and sending" such material, Storer must have shared "a large amount of material" over the years.

Advocate Giles Emanuel, defending, told the Court that Storer had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity and shown a significant level of cooperation. He added that, while in custody, Storer had sought the support of the prison's psychology team "out of his own desire not to offend again."

 Returning the sentence, the Deputy Bailiff, Tim Le Cocq, who was sitting with Jurats Pamela Pitman, Jane Ronge, Paul Nicolle, Jerry Ramsden and Rozanne Thomas, described Storer's offending as deliberate.

He noted that Storer had "shown no real appreciation of the pernicious and devastating effect the industry you are part of has on children." 

He ordered that his name remain on the Sex Offenders' Register for five years and imposed a restrictive order for 18 years. He sentenced Storer to a "substantial custodial sentence" of four years.