A peeping-tom paedophile who filmed a young Knighton girl through her bedroom window, and had a stash of 127,000 indecent images of children, is back behind bars.
Elwyn John Durant used a camcorder, able to record at day or night, to video hours of the child playing and undressing. He initially claimed he was trying to record red kites.
The footage was found alongside more than 127,000 indecent photographs of children in his bedroom at Fronhir, Knighton, while he was still on licence for earlier child pornography charges.
Durant was given a four year jail sentence at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court on Wednesday. He will serve half of the term in custody and will then be released on licence for another four years.
The 56-year-old former science teacher was previously convicted of 15 child pornography offences, including making possession and taking indecent images, in June 2006 at Wood Green Court, London.
Released in November 2007 after serving half of a three-year prison sentence, he returned to live, on a licence, with his elderly parents in Knighton. It was during a random visit to monitor him that police discovered the images, five camcorders and 40 cassettes, piles of DVDs and CDs, computer equipment, cuddly toys and cut out catalogue photographs of children in underwear.
Prosecuting, Sarah Waters said Durant snatched some DVDs from the police, saying they could not see them, before admitting they may contain indecent images.
He said the Metropolitan Police gave them to him when they returned his property.
The discs were examined and found to contain 33,795 category one images (the least explicit), 2,427 category two images, 6,252 category three images, 6,739 category four images, 934 category five images(the most explicit), and 83,119 images which have not been categorised.
He had also been copying old images on to DVDs and therefore making indecent pictures.
Ms Waters said he had a “highly organised method of storing data which would have taken some considerable time”.
Durant, who admitted 16 offences, denied being aroused by photographs of children.
Defending, Leighton Hughes said the images would provoke the greatest sense of revulsion in right-minded people. But he said the images were not fresh, they had been in Durant’s possession in 2006 and he had been copying them on to DVDs.
Since being released on licence, Durant had not used the internet and had not had contact with children, but he acknowledged the development of the making of images by the invasion of privacy.
He said Durant was an intelligent man who had maintained a position of respect for many years, but had not had conventional relationships and was a loner.
He said reports showed Durant had made good progress and had shown “victim empathy”, but whether that was deception or hope for the future was difficult to assess.
Sentencing Durant, Judge John Curran said he posed a significant risk of harm to children and had an “unhealthy and persistent interest in children and indecency with children of a kind which needs to be firmly discouraged”.
As well as the jail term, Durant was banned from working with children and was given a lifelong obligation to register as a sex offender.
He was also given a sexual offences prevention order banning him from owning or using a computer or telephone device to gain access to the internet, banned from using cameras, camcorders or mobile phones with cameras, and banned from allowing any children under 16 to visit him at any premises unless they were accompanied by a parent or guardian.