A sex offender has been sent back to prison for trying to stop police finding out he had been accessing online images of child abuse.
Andrew Roocroft told officers he did not have a laptop when they visited his caravan near Tiverton but they found a Dell under his bed.
Experts were able to recover almost 800 images of children which he had deleted and found incriminating search terms in his internet history.
These showed he had been looking for images of young girls and of pre-teen boys having sex with adult women, Exeter Crown Court was told.
Roocroft was subject of a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO) at the time as a result of being caught with similar images in 2011.
He broke the order by not telling police he had the laptop and trying to hide it under his bed when they searched his home.
Roocroft, aged 35, of Collipriest, Tiverton, but currently at Channings Wood Prison, Newton Abbot, admitted three offences of making indecent images of children and four of breaching his SOPO.
He was jailed for three years by Recorder Mr Donald Tait, who told him: ’You have breached the order in the past and it doesn’t seem you have learned your lesson.
’It is an aggravating feature that you sought to conceal this laptop from the police and there were a significant number of images accessed in a relatively short period of time.
’The probation report does not make happy reading. It confirms your ongoing sexual interest in young girls and that these offences occurred at a time when you were being monitored by the police.’
Miss Francesca Whebell, prosecuting, said police carried out a check on Roocroft in August last year as a result of other breaches of the SOPO which led to him being jailed for 18 months.
His Dell laptop was found hidden under the bed and was sent to the police’s high-tech crime unit. Their report only arrived after he was jailed in November and showed he had 794 images.
These included 120 in the worst category A, which shows children having sex with adults. All had been deleted and none could be accessed.
Search terms were also found including the words pre-teen and the abbreviation PTHC, which stands for pre-teen hard core. One search was for ’PTHC women and boys’.
Miss Whebell said Roocroft broke four clauses in his SOPO by not telling police he had a computer and mobile phone, hiding the laptop, and using the internet to search for the images.
He told officers he had done so because ’he didn’t want the police breathing down my neck’.
Mr James Rickard, mitigating, said all these offences pre-date Roocroft’s last sentence and may not have added very much to it if they had been known about at the time.
Roocroft would have been released from the last sentence in September but has stayed in prison after admitting these offences when interviewed by police while at Channings Wood, near Newton Abbot.
He said ’He was living on his own and was incredibly isolated and wanting friendship. He was lonely. The prospect of being released frightens him.’