Pictures included four-week-old victims

PERVERT Alan Morley has been jailed after he was caught with ‘sickening’ child abuse images – for the third time.

Police found thousands of pictures – featuring children as young as four weeks old – on a USB device hidden in the 60-year-old’s bedside drawer.

Among the 13,253 images were 1,054 that experts deemed to be ‘Category A’ – the most serious.

Stoke-on-trent Crown Court heard police went to Morley’s home in Boundary Close, Leek, on October 26, 2017.

Prosecutor Jonathan Dickinson said: “Officers seized various items, in particular a USB device which was found hidden, it would seem, inside a tablet box in a drawer at the side of the defendant’s bed.

“It contained a large number of indecent images of children. There were more than 1,000 of Category A; 1,000 of Category B and over 11,000 Category C.

“The defendant was interviewed on the same day. He admitted responsibility for the downloading of the images over a period of time.

“He could not really offer any explanation as to why he had done it.”

Mr Dickinson added: “There are a number of aggravating features, not least the age and the vulnerability of the children depicted.”

Morley, who was once heavily involved in amateur dramatics groups in his home town, pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children.

The court heard he was jailed for similar offences in February 2008, then in November 2009 received a suspended sentence for further offending of the same type. He then appeared in court again the following year after failing to comply with the requirements of his suspended sentence order.

Robert Holt, mitigating, said: “The strongest point in mitigation is his early guilty plea.

He’s a man in poor health. He’s married with adult children.

“He says his initial inquiry was due to boredom and curiosity. There needs to be work done with this individual in order for him to understand why it’s such a problem to behave this way and why it is taken so seriously when people are in possession of these types of images.”

Judge David Fletcher said the chances of Morley being rehabilitated were low, and sentenced him to 16 months in prison.

Judge Fletcher said: “The descriptions of the images that I have read are sickening. They describe children as young as four weeks involved in sexual activity with adults.

“This detail relates to a desperately unhealthy and illegal interest by you in those sorts of images. Your assertions that you did this out of boredom are ridiculous.

“These were real children. The inescapable truth of the matter is that, if there were not people like you who were looking at these images, there would not be children being vilely abused to the extent that there are.”

A Sexual Harm Prevention Order restricting Morley’s use of the internet was imposed. He will be on the Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years.