Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Evil abuse couple ‘will go to jail’
Vile pair raped girl & shared pictures with paedos online
A COUPLE who photographed themselves abusing a toddler they had raped were warned yesterday to expect “significant sentences”.
Judge Piers Grant told the vile pair – who dressed up their victim in sexual poses – their case involved serious offences in which they had betrayed the trust of a young child.
Gary and Heather Talbot from Kinghill Avenue in Newcastle, Co Down, pleaded guilty to a string of sexual offences between 2001 and 2003 when the girl was 18 months to three years and three months.
Postman and bus driver Talbot, 60, admitted 16 charges including two rapes, gross indecency, indecent assault, taking and distributing indecent images of a child, and a separate charge of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old between 2012 and 2014.
His 59-year-old wife 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.
Both sat in the dock just yards from their now grown-up victim in the public gallery supported by family and friends.
Their own lawyers told Downpatrick Crown Court, sitting in Belfast, little could be said in their mitigation, save the guilty pleas.
Earlier, prosecution QC David Mcdowell outlined the couple’s abuse of the youngster and of internet boasts to other paedophiles, recovered on computer equipment seized at their home in October 2017.
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He also revealed an external harddrive was recovered from a locked bedroom cupboard – with the key was hidden within the pages of the novel Lolita.
Counsel said 47 indecent images, apparently recording three occasions of abuse, including rape, were taken of the toddler.
The couple were naked in some of these pictures. Mr
Mcdowell said while initially making “no comment” in police interviews, Talbot also denied any sexual interest in children, before admitting: “It is just the wrong road I have taken.”
He also “disputed” claims of raping the child, until shown “a clear photograph”, and denied knowingly sharing the pictures.
However, Mr Mcdowell said Talbot later accepted “going through a phase where he was attracted to children and it was “around this time when he abused” the toddler.
He admitted “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 the child for “posing” in bed surrounded by porn magazines – but he claimed the youngster had posed with the magazines, “of her own accord”.
Mr Mcdowell said Heather “commented that it was ‘just a fantasy that we carried too far’, before correcting herself, saying, ‘it was his fantasy, not mine really’.”
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 grown-up toddler, she said she would apologise,
“for what he’s done to her”, while still maintaining, “she hadn’t done anything”.
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”.
Judge Grant said sentencing would be next month.
He accepted having a ‘phase’ of finding children attractive DAVID MCDOWELL QC COURT YESTERDAY
When she dressed the toddler she didn’t think it’d go as far as it did... DAVID MCDOWELL QC COURT YESTERDAY