- Downloaded over half a million child sexual abuse pictures and videos
52-year-old Gerrard Charnley, a paedophile who kept a diary where he outlined children he wanted to abuse “someday very soon sexually” has been sent to jail.
Penning horrific details of his depraved desires, Charnley declared in the twisted journal that he was “proud to be a paedophile.”
The twisted man wrote in his “My Paedophile Diary” the names of children he wanted to rape alongside the dates he wanted to carry out the attacks.
He also downloaded “paedophile manuals” titled “The Paedophile’s Handbook” and “How to Practice Child Love” which contained advice and guidance about abusing children.
In one disturbing entry dated June 2019, Charnley wrote: “I want to rape [girl’s name withheld] someday very soon. I’m proud to say this as a paedophile.”
law enforcement officers unearthed the secret memoir when they raided his home in Coronation Drive, Widnes, on February 27, 2024. They seized 12 electronic devices.
Charnley had collected so many child abuse pictures and videos that the police were unable to count just how many files he had downloaded.
This week, he appeared at Liverpool Crown Court where he was jailed for 14 months and was handed a 10-year sexual harm prevention order.
Charnley was also told to sign the sex offenders’ register for the next decade. He nodded when he was told he would be going to prison and told the judge as he left the dock: “I’m guilty. I’m sorry, ok.’
Prosecutor, Sarah Holt said one document found on his devices was titled “My Paedophile Diary,” which “contained references to specific dates and what the defendant wanted to do to particular children”.
This diary also contained a list of Charnley’s favourite websites for viewing indecent images of children and a list headed “preteen s**gs I’d love to rape”. Other Word documents and PDF files he had created included “P@edo Thoughts 2019”.
He was meanwhile found to have used his laptop to access the dark web, with his browser containing bookmarks for sites labelled “p@edo links”, “naughty kids” and “little girls”.
The history of the VLC Media Player app on his Samsung Galaxy tablet also showed that Charnley had watched videos with titles which were “indicative of material containing child @buse.”
Charnley was also found to have collected a total of 15,081 pictures and 2,308 videos graded as being in category A, those showing the most serious forms of abuse.
These included images of babies being sexually abused.
He further downloaded 17,383 Category B images and 169,968 Category C images, as well as nine computer-generated prohibited images of children and nine extreme pornographic images.
More than 230,000 additional images were not categorised by the police due to the sheer volume of material present on his devices.
Under interview, Charnley claimed that he “remembered downloading documents such as a paedophile manual, but thought he had deleted it without reading it”.
Defence Counsel, Myles Wilson, told the court that his client had contacted Stop It Now, a charity which works to prevent child sexual abuse, following his arrest and suffers from “poor physical and mental health”.
He added: “He gives help to his elderly father, who has mobility issues and rarely leaves the house. The defendant does his father’s shopping.
“Clearly he had become obsessed with this type of material, almost a compulsion. He was open with the police in acknowledging that he has issues and that he finds children attractive.
“He does not want to be in this position in the future. He was relieved, he tells me, when he was arrested, because he realised that this chapter of his life was coming to an end.”
Charnley admitted possession of indecent images of children, three counts of making indecent images, possession of prohibited images of children, possession of extreme pornography images and possession of a p@edophile manual.
During sentencing, the Honorary Recorder of Liverpool, Judge Andrew Menary KC said: “This court sees, sadly, many cases of this type. But your case, compared to others, is one where the nature of the material recovered and the content of the images depicted is truly shocking.
“There were so many images, something approaching half a million, recovered from your devices.
“I am told that there are 232,000 images which remain uncategorised, such was the sheer scale of the task. It is safe to say that your collection of images was enormous by any standard.
“You appear to have been keeping a diary of the sorts of things you would like to do to children. They are horrific.
“They may well be you playing out your fantasies in writing, but they demonstrate the depraved, perverted nature of your desires and your reason for accessing all of this material.
“This written material demonstrates clearly that yours was not an idle obsession, but one where you were fixated on the abuse of children. It is trite to observe that while you yourself did not generate these images, your accessing of them and collecting of them develops a market for this sort of material.
“I have given very careful consideration to whether or not any sentence other than immediate imprisonment is available for this particular offending. It is often the case that defendants such as you, who have committed this type of offence, will benefit from construction intervention by the Probation Service.
“But there are some offences which fall into a category where the offending can only be described as particularly serious of its type. I am afraid that that is the position so far as you are concerned.
“I am satisfied that only an immediate term of imprisonment is appropriate to deal with offending of the scale and type described in this case where you have quite deliberately, over many years, sought out and collected a huge quantity of appalling material.
“Alongside that you have generated your own material, demonstrating that you have a clear desire to participate in the abuse of these children.”
