July 2010 Child abuse images collector’s jail term is slashed A CHILD abuse images collector jailed for hoarding a “gigantic” cache of sick material had his prison sentence slashed by a third by top judges in London. John Fox, 46, of no fixed address, was living with his elderly mother, near Fakenham, when police raided and found the stash, stacked almost to the ceiling. In February, after admitting numerous counts of making indecent photos of children and possessing such pictures, he was jailed for three years But on Friday, after an appeal at London’s Court of Appeal, three top judges slashed his sentence to two years. Fox was caught out when police, investigating the sale of child pornography on eBay, raided the house in 2007. Stephen Spence, prosecuting, said Fox was completely co-operative when police searched his bedroom in his mother’s home Barsham, near Fakenham, after an investigation by Cheshire officers which involved the sale of DVDs on the web site E-bay They found videos, DVDs and magazines, many of them containing often horrific images of child abuse. Some of the material was of the worst kind, involving sex between children and adults, bestiality and sadism. Fox was cooperative with police and frank when quizzed, admitting that he had been amassing his collection since the mid-1980s, sometimes paying £200 for a single magazine. Giving the appeal judgment on Friday, Justice Christopher Clarke, sitting with Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Mr Justice Cranston, said the amount of material found was “gigantic” and much of it of “extreme seriousness”. But he continued: “Despite the volume of material which he amassed, there was no evidence of distribution. He made the images only in the sense that he had downloaded them or printed them from the internet.” Fox had made immediate admissions, pleaded guilty and knew that what he was doing was wrong. He concluded: “We regard the sentence of three years as manifestly excessive. “We propose to substitute for it a sentence of two years.”