A 61-year-old bakery manager who would spend hours trawling through thousands of obscene images of babies and young children being abused was jailed for 30 months yesterday.
The horrific details of some of the worst photos and videos were told to Inverness Sheriff Court last month when sentence was deferred on Christopher Woodfine, of Nairn.
He had admitted possessing the images stored on computer equipment at his home between January, 2012 and April, 2014.
In total, he had 13,254 still images and 102 videos.
Of these, 658 pictures and 39 videos were of the worst in the scale of depravity.
Fiscal depute Roderick Urquhart described some of content which Sheriff Margaret Neilson said “was truly horrific.”
She told the first offender: “These are not victimless crimes and your behaviour took place over two years, A custodial sentence is the only appropriate way of dealing with this. You will also be placed on the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years.”
Defending Neil Wilson said; “He can’t explain this bizarre behaviour. He is in a stable relationship and has a supportive wife. He can only think he was under stress at the time doing long hours and night shifts.
“He got no sexual gratification out of them, but he would spend hours at a time looking at image after image. There are victims this and he is only beginning to realise the damage done in cases like this.
“He has been assessed as unlikely to re-offend and is perplexed and horrified by his obsessive behaviour.”