Depraved NI couple told they face ‘significant jail time’ over rape of toddler
A MARRIED Co Down couple who photographed themselves naked abusing a toddler they had raped have been warned that they face “significant sentences”.
Gary and Heather Talbot were told by Judge Piers Grant that their case involved very serious offences in which they had betrayed the trust of a very young child and that it was only realistic for them to expect to be given significant jail terms when sentenced next month.
In May last year, the paedophiles from Kinghill Avenue in the seaside town of Newcastle, pleaded guilty to a series of sex offences. The crimes were committed between 2001 and 2003 when the child was aged between 18 months and three years and three months old.
The 60-year-old postman and bus driver admitted a total of 16 charges including two rapes, gross indecency, indecent assault, and taking and distributing indecent images of the child, as well as a separate charge of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old child sometime between July 2012 and July 2014.
His 59-year-old wife Heather admitted 10 charges, including aiding and abetting her husband to rape the little girl, indecently assaulting her, committing acts of gross indecency, and three charges of taking indecent images of the youngster.
Both sat in the dock just yards from their now grown-up victim in the public gallery. At one stage Gary Talbot, who listened to the details of his crimes with his eyes shut, shook his head from side to side in apparent denial, while his wife kept looking to the side, her eyes cast down.
Lawyers for the pair told Downpatrick Crown Court, sitting in Belfast, that little could be said in their mitigation, save their guilty pleas, demonstrative of their remorse and shame.
Earlier, prosecution QC David McDowell outlined in detail too graphic to report the couples’ perverted abuse of the youngster, and of internet chats and boasts to other paedophiles, recovered on a variety of computer equipment seized from their home in October 2017.
He also revealed an external hard drive was recovered from a locked bedroom cupboard, the key of which was secreted within the pages of the novel Lolita, on a bedside table.
Counsel explained a total of 47 indecent images, apparently recording three separate occasions of abuse, including rape, were taken of the toddler, which also showed the couple naked on some of the images.
Mr McDowell said while initially giving ‘no comment’ police interviews, Gary Talbot also denied any sexual interest in children, before admitting by his third interview: “It is just the wrong road I have taken.”
And while he initially disputed claims of raping the child, until shown “a clear photograph”, and denied knowingly sharing the pictures, he did finally admit to being “totally ashamed”, although he claimed he only “looked at the image twice in 15 years, but not for sexual gratification”. However, Mr McDowell said Talbot later accepted “going through a phrase where he was sexually attracted to children” and it was “around this time when he abused” the toddler, and “it was he who had introduced children to his and Heather’s sexual relationship”.
He also accepted it was his idea to buy clothes from Dunnes, to dress-up the child for ‘posing’, pictured in bed surrounded by pornographic magazines.
However, he claimed the youngster had posed with the magazines “of her own accord”.
Questioned about their online chatroom activities, using the names ‘Mike and Fiona’, Talbot “struggled to explain”, Mr McDowell said.
While claiming “he was embellishing for the sake of the chats”, Talbot later “confirmed” he’d been talking about the toddler “and that he shared the indecent images” of her.
When questioned, his wife Heather said she was “60-70% confident” the images were of the toddler, but denied being “aware of the photograph” of her husband raping the child.
Mr McDowell said Heather Talbot “commented that it was ‘just a fantasy that we carried too far’, before correcting herself, saying, ‘It was his fantasy, not mine really’,” before adding it was “not really” her fantasy, and that “she played along”.
She claimed she would have been working or shopping when the toddler was abused and when asked about the images, said “she was sick”.
She continually denied being present during the rapes, although accepted buying more than one outfit for the youngster, and dressing her up, “once or twice, it was no more than that”.
Mr McDowell said by her last interview Heather Talbot “repeated her denials” of taking the photographs, claiming the rape pictures were “taken using a tripod and when she dressed the toddler up, she did not think it would go as far as it did”.
However, when asked what she would say to the now grownup toddler, she said she would apologise “for what he’s done to her”, while still maintaining “she hadn’t done anything”.
Defence QC Greg Berry, for Gary Talbot, said his admissions allowed for the identification of his victim. This, said Mr Berry, he did out of a sense of shame and remorse, and to spare the victim having to give evidence.
Eugene Grant QC, when questioned if Mrs Talbot was contesting her guilty pleas, said she accepted her role, but as a “reluctant participant” in what had happened. She met her husband, he added, aged 16, marrying him at 19 and that it had been a happy marriage.
What had occurred had been the fantasy of her husband, not her’s and that she was involved in just three of the incidents, he said. Mr Grant said Heather Talbot had expressed her remorse for what happened, and was “disgusted” with herself that it ever happened, and had “blotted it out” by placing it at the “back of her brain”.