Febuary 2012 A TOTNES MAN has been jailed for four months after being found guilty of child porn offences after downloading illegal images to his landlady’s laptop.
Double glazing salesman Matthew McKendry was caught downloading the images by his landlady Sophie Brooks, who discovered the images on her laptop computer after McKendry had used it. Ms Brooks told the court she had attempted to access her Facebook page, but was, instead, redirected to the explicit pages that had been previously browsed by McKendry. She said: “I saw young girls sat in sexual positions. They were not totally naked, but they had knickers on. Alarm bells started going off in my head. It was not very nice. “I also found similar pictures saved in the My Documents file, which had labels like Mother and Daughter. I was really shocked. The girls were eight or nine, or around that age. “The girls were sat in positions which were not right. It was horrible. I closed the computer down. I took the laptop to the police the next day.” Mr McKendry, of Apple Wharf, Totnes, denied seven counts of making or possessing indecent images of children.  He denied ever accessing the sites and claimed other visitors to the house must have been responsible. He went on to claim he had been staying at his mother’s home in Totnes when many of the images were downloaded, and therefore had no access to the laptop at the time. At the time of the offences Mr McKendry was renting a room from Ms Brooks at her Torquay home.The court also heard Mr McKendry’s iPhone had been used to access child abuse sites and 518 still images and three movies had been downloaded to the phone. Mr McKendry, 31, sobbed as he was convicted at Exeter Crown Court. Sentencing Mr McKendry Judge Graham Cottle said: “The defence you advanced was deeply unattractive in that it involved accusations against your two housemates or friends of theirs who visited the house. “You made completely unfounded assertions that suggested your two housemates were untruthful witnesses. They were not. They told the truth in every respect from beginning to end. “The gravity of cases of this sort is that because there are people who are interested in viewing images of this sort it means young children are in danger of being sexually exploited.”