Hartlepool loner had largest collection of child indecency images police officer had ever seen

Lee Dennison, from Hartlepool, downloaded over 150,000 indecent images of children and hundreds of hours of videos for years in his squalid flat.

Teesside Crown Court heard the 45-year-old was obsessed with filling up his various computer and storage devices.

In total, police charged Dennison with possessing over 158,624 indecent and illegal images after raiding his home in March last year.

But the court heard that was just from a selection of 36 devices seized by police who did not have the manpower to examine each one in detail.

Prosecutor Robin Turton said there was evidence of more illegal material on them and the judge said the true number would be in the hundreds of thousands.

Mr Turton said: “The premises contained his server. It was being used to store a huge amount of child abuse material with the facility that others might access material which the host was storing.”

Police were unable to say whether other perverts had accessed the material.

Dennison had 1,969 images of the worst kind of abuse, 2,163 in the next category of seriousness and 153,940 in the lowest categorisation.

He amassed the vast sick collection between September 2005 and March 2019.

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Dennison, of Dobson Place, also pleaded guilty to possessing 450 prohibited images of children and 102 extreme pornographic images.

The court heard the child victims in the images ranged from very young to teens.

He also had around 1.2 million non-indecent pictures of children.

Mr Turton added: “The investigating officer has never come across a case where the quantity of indecent images of children and child abuse.”

Judge Jonathan Carroll rejected claims by Dennison that he did not have a sexual interest in children saying he showed a “total lack of insight” into his crimes.

Nigel Soppitt, mitigating, said he was a socially inadequate hoarder whose life has gone unchecked since the death of his mother.

Jailing Dennison for two years, Judge Carroll said: “When you commit these offences they are not just video files, they are files of real children really being sexually abused and in seeking out this material you are promoting and encouraging the market in this material.”

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