June 2005 School caretaker’s child porn shame LONELY school caretaker Douglas Saunders used his computer to download thousands of pornographic images of children while he was a trusted employee at Marlwood School in Alveston, a court heard this week. Only the “artificial” nature of the computer-generated pictures and his seriously depressed mental state saved Saunders from a jail sentence for his “deviant” behaviour,” a Bristol Crown Court judge told the 44-year-old single man who worked at the school for 27 years until his resignation last year. Saunders told police who searched his bungalow in the school grounds that he had no sexual motivation and only viewed the pictures “out of curiosity”. But making him the subject of a three-year community rehabilitation order and ordering him to undergo treatment on a sex offenders’ programme, Judge Julian Lambert told him: “You have to accept that you have a deviant sexual interest in children and you must recognise and deal with that. “Continuing to say it was just curiosity will not do. You are in denial and you need insight into your deviancy.” “You have been saved from prison by the fact that the images were pseudo or artificial and thus you have not perpetrated the abuse of children by your deviant behaviour.” The court heard that experts were satisified Saunders was not a danger to children and that the offences were driven by long-standing depression and loneliness. Saunders – who was also placed on the Sex Offenders Register – had initially denied 15 specimen counts of making indecent images of a child but later changed his pleas to guilty. In court on Tuesday he asked for the remaining images found on his computer hard drive – totalling more than 7,800 and including some downloaded from a pornographic website called Boys Love – to be taken into consideration. Character witnesses, including former senior staff at the school, attested to Saunders’ total dependability, trustworthiness and “proper” behaviour towards pupils. Prosecutor Jennifer Tallentire said police went to Saunders’ bungalow in May last year following suggestions that he might have taken his own life. “They searched the bungalow and discovered things that concerned them,” she said. “There was a photograph of a female partially undressed in school uniform and some female underwear. “Child Protection Officers then carried out a search of the entire bungalow and in the loft they found a black bin liner containing a computer hard drive and three blue bin liners containing box files of pictures of children printed off from the internet.” Miss Tallentire said subsequent examination of the hard drive revealed 7,833 indecent images of children, most of them at the lower end of the indecency scale. Two movie clips were also found. When interviewed Saunders admitted he had paid for access to sites showing images of children as young as eight. “He said he believed they were legal and the prints were also not illegal,” said Miss Tallentire. “He denied finding anything sexual about the images and said he viewed them out of curiosity.” Nicholas O’Brien, defending, said the clothing found in the bungalow belonged to a previous girlfriend and was not relevant. He said his client was a lonely man with failed relationships behind him and long-standing psychological problems. He had made several suicide bids and had undergone treatment including electro-convulsive therapy. “In his loneliness and curiosity he spent some time on the internet viewing these images which he should not have done,” he said. The pictures themselves were not the most serious of their type, Mr O’Brien told the court, and during all Saunders’ years at the school there had never been a complaint concerning his behaviour.