August 2010 Paedophile jailed after police raid found sick images A SEX offender on the run has been jailed for three years after cops tracked him down to a North Wales flat.  Sick Wayne Darren Clarke, 33, who was banned from owning equipment to access the internet, rented a flat at Wern Fechan, Ruthin, posing as a businessman.  He even registered his car in a different name so that he would not be traced by police cameras when he moved across the border from Nottingham.  But when officers raided his rented flat they found a laptop computer, a memory stick and two BlackBerry phones. They contained 252 indecent images of children and 48 videos.  At Mold Crown Court, Judge Dafydd Hughes jailed him for three years and placed him on the sex offenders’ register for life. He also made a fresh Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO) to try to curb his future activities.  Clarke admitted failing to notify police of his new address in Ruthin, breaching his previous SOPO, and possessing cocaine, together with 15 charges of making indecent images of children.  He also admitted distributing one image which the judge said took the case to a more serious category.  Judge Hughes said Clarke had been made the subject of an SOPO in 2006 but had previously breached it twice.  He was assessed as being at a high risk of re-offending.  “You really do not understand the seriousness of what you have done,” he said.  “Each time someone like you gains access to these images you create a demand for them.  “If people like you stopped looking at them then there would probably be fewer instances of abuse and less of a risk to children being made to suffer.”  Judge Hughes said he had the misfortune to view some of the images on a police officer’s laptop and he described them as “distressing to look at”.  Andrew McInnes, prosecuting, told how the defendant had rented a room for six months in Ruthin posing as a businessman.  On December 10 he was arrested when he went to Corbetts the bookmakers in Ruthin. He provided false details and an Apple iphone was recovered from him at that stage. Police then searched his room and found a computer, a memory stick, two BlackBerry phones and an X-box game station.  When the images were found, he told police he knew he had a problem because when drunk or high on drugs he downloaded the images.  But he could not recall doing it, he said, and when sober he deleted them.  Police officers also found that on one phone he had sent about 100 text messages to a woman, the mother of a young girl, whom he met through an internet dating site.  Officers were concerned that the messages appeared to be encouraging the commission of a sexual offence.  They discovered that he had sent her an image of a female girl indulging in a sex act with an adult male.  Police seized the woman’s phone and found the image still on it. The defendant made no comment about that but admitted he had been in touch with the woman, but not her daughter.  Gwyn Jones, in mitigation, said Clarke had been in custody since December but there had been a delay in analysing the computers and phones. He had co-operated fully. The images were for his own personal interest and he stressed that only one image had been distributed.  He said Clarke had taken advantage of a course to deal with his addiction to pornography and drugs in prison and that he planned to return to the Nottingham area on his release.