Investigator Found Child Porn Images on Home Computer
Expert evidence has been given in the trial of a city man accused of downloading child pornography on his computers at home and in his office at Devon County Council's youth services.
Anthony Fell, 45, of Cheyne Rise, Pinhoe, was employed as a management and information systems administrator for the county council's Children and Young People's Service Business Unit at the time that the alleged offences were discovered.
Police officer Paul Wright, of the force high-tech crime unit, gave evidence on the third day of Fell's trial at Exeter Crown Court yesterday.
Fell has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of making indecent photographs of children, involving downloading a total of 873 images from the internet.
He was suspended from his job after images of young girls posing in their underwear were discovered on his computer in November 2006.
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The court has heard he told police that he had not downloaded the images found on his work computer, while the ones on his home equipment must have been accidentally sent through the web when he looked for adult pornography.
He added that some may have been accidentally downloaded through an investigation he did for the youth services department about the legitimate social networking site MySpace.
Mr Wright told the court that indecent images were found on Fell's office computer.
They were also found on two drives, which were both part of a piece of computer equipment, and on a laptop, all three of which were kept at his home.
The witness said that there was evidence in the deleted area of Fell's work computer that the user had looked at the MySpace site, which is a legitimate social networking site.
The MySpace use was a ?very small? percentage of deleted files on the computer.
Mr Wright added that 12 people had used that particular computer at one time or another.
He described how both adult pornography and indecent images of children were found on two drives in a computer tower at Fell's home.
When he tried to examine the history of internet use on this equipment, it appeared that either the user had never accessed the web or that they had deleted all records of their visits to it.
Forensic examination showed somebody had specially created a folder on one of the drives to store pornographic files which had been downloaded from the web.
There was also evidence to suggest that some of the indecent images of children had been duplicated from one computer drive on to the other. Images range from a large number assessed as category one, which is the least offensive, to several at category four, which is one level below the worst possible.
Prosecutor Emily Pitts told the jury to disregard 26 of the indecent images found on the work computer and only consider the remaining 12.
She said this was because they could have been handled by council staff during their investigation, which would complicate matters for the jury.
The trial continues.
UPDATE:Pictures 'not download by me' jury told.
IT worker Anthony Fell has told a jury that somebody else must have downloaded indecent images of children onto his work computer at Devon County Council's youth services in Exeter.
The 45-year-old, of Cheyne Rise, Pinhoe, yesterday said: ?I don't know how (the images got there). They were either copied or downloaded, not by me.?
Fell was employed as a management and information systems administrator for the council's children and young people's services business unit at the time the images were discovered on his office computer. He was then suspended and police then searched his house and discovered hundreds of other images.
Fell denies 11 charges of making indecent photographs of children, involving downloading a total of 873 images from the internet.
Defence counsel Nigel Wraith asked him: ?Did anyone have your user password??
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Fell replied: ?Yes they did,? naming another man. He added: ?No other person had access to my user name and password but others did have access.
?I have logged into my system, sat down and then walked away before.?
Under cross-examination by prosecutor Emily Pitts, Fell agreed that a folder had been created on his work computer, with his user name and password, in which child porn images were stored and that it contained a photo of him.
?Any suggestion someone else created this subfolder... is just fanciful, isn't it?? asked the prosecutor, to which Fell replied: ?I wouldn't know,? adding that another person must have moved the photograph of him into the folder.
The trial continues.