A former council boss caught with almost 6,000 child pornography images fantasised with adults on internet chatrooms about having sex with children, a court has heard.Lawyer Andrew Laycock, the former Head of Legal Services at Hertfordshire County Council, chatted with other paedophiles on MSN messenger.
But yesterday the 59-year-old escaped jail after a judge heard that he had been attending courses to help him overcome his long-term perversion.
Prosecutor Peter Shaw told St Albans Crown Court that police armed with a search warrant raided the home Laycock shared with his wife and two step sons in Hertford at 6.45 in the morning on June 22 last year.
Laycock, who had answered the door, said he was responsible for the images.
His Apple Mac computer was analysed and found to contain images, mostly of young girls aged between ten and 14.
Some 4,634 were at Level 1, 121 at Level 2, 516 at Level 3, 370 at Level 4 and 79 at Level 5 - the most serious level. All were images and none were movies. In all there were 5,720 images.
In a police interview Laycock confessed that his dark secret had gone on since he was a teenager.
'He said he had interacted with other adults on MSN messenger and had talked to other adults about having sex with children. He admitted the fantasies involved children as young as seven or eight, ' said Mr Shaw.
Laycock had pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to 17 counts of making indecent images of children and one count of possessing more than 5,700 indecent images during June last year. Read More
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