IAN ANTHONY HARRIS OF SWANSEA SENTENCED FOR CHILD SEX IMAGE OFFENSES AFTER PREVIOUS MURDER CASE
A man with a long and violent criminal history has been reimprisoned after being found with indecent images of children.Ian Anthony Harris, who previously served 17 years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Mandy Jackson, was caught with child sex abuse images after visiting internet sex chatrooms.
Harris, who murdered 21-year-old Mandy Jackson in 1988 by pouring petrol over her and setting her on fire at her flat in Uplands, Swansea, was initially sentenced to life for the killing.
Dean Pulling, prosecuting, told Swansea Crown Court that on February 10 this year, police from the South Wales Police Online Investigation Team (Polit) received information linking Harris’s computer activity to a residence in the Ravenhill area of Swansea.
Officers located Harris at his workplace and took him back to his Swansea home, where they discovered a desktop computer in his bedroom containing 18 indecent images, including one classified as Category A, the most severe form.
Evidence also showed Harris had shared a Category B image.
At the hearing, Harris, aged 52, pled guilty to one count of distributing indecent images of children and three counts of possession of such images in custody.
He explained during police interviews that he had downloaded these images after browsing sexual chatrooms online, where the conversations were often explicitly sexual.
Harris admitted to uploading a Category B image at the request of someone else in a chatroom.
The court was also told that Harris has previous convictions for approximately 22 offenses, including murder.
He was released from prison in 2006 but was recalled after his recent arrest.
His defense representative, Dan Griffiths, stated that Harris recognized the need to prove to the parole board that he no longer posed a danger.
Griffiths highlighted that Harris is a family man, had begun a new relationship after his 2006 release, and worked for six years as a greenskeeper at a Swansea golf course.
Recorder Ifan Wyn Lloyd addressed Harris directly, emphasizing the severity of possessing child images.
He said, "Behind every one of these images there is a child being abused - these are not just images, these are real children being abused so people like you can get some sort of perverted pleasure from viewing them." Harris was sentenced to a total of eight months in prison for the offenses.
Additionally, he will remain on the sex offenders register for the next 10 years and was placed under an indefinite Sexual Harm Prevention Order restricting his internet access.
