An unemployed sex offender unmasked by police in Canberra after an international tip-off has admitted to possessing more than 1400 disgusting child abuse files and sharing such material with other internet users.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Ernest Henry Yardley is soon to be sentenced in the ACT Supreme Court after pleading guilty to four counts of transmitting and soliciting child exploitation material, as well as one count of possessing it.
The 35-year-old entered his pleas after the charges were "rolled up" to encompass a much longer list of offences he committed between April 2018 and February last year.
The details of his crimes can now be revealed, with an agreed statement of facts tendered to the court last Thursday showing that Yardley used the messaging applications WhatsApp and Telegram to chat with other users and transmit material online.
The Gilmore resident also used Dropbox, an online file storage and sharing service, to hoard and share his collection.
Yardley was caught out when the Australian Federal Police received reports in January last year from the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, which believed he might be involved in illegal online activity.
Acting on that information, investigators raided Yardley's home a month later and found a smartphone, external hard drive, micro SD card, laptop and tablet that contained a total of 1434 files later classified as child exploitation material.
In the case of the Samsung Galaxy phone, the deplorable files were neatly organised in folders and subfolders with names like "babies", "CHIKOS" and "CP gay".
Further examination of the devices also turned up records of the online chats, in which Yardley later admitted he had "transmitted and made available [child exploitation material] to 13 different recipients ... and caused CEM to be transmitted to himself".
In some of the messages detailed in the agreed facts, Yardley traded videos and photos of children, many of them prepubescent, engaged in sexual acts.
He also identified himself as someone who lived off "money from the government", and discussed his depraved fantasies in graphic detail.
"I'm still a virgin but I like looking at younger teen boys," Yardley told one person, with whom he also discussed the use of networks that could make their activities less vulnerable to detection by authorities.
When asked by one of his online acquaintances if they were "bad people", Yardley responded: "No we are just horny."
Yardley spent one night in custody following his arrest on February 5 last year, and has been on conditional bail ever since.
Sentencing proceedings began last Thursday, but they were quickly adjourned after barrister Beth Morrisroe, prosecuting for the Commonwealth, flagged an objection to two paragraphs of a psychiatric report on the 35-year-old.
Ms Morrisroe told Justice Chrissa Loukas-Karlsson that the issue could be resolved through cross-examination of the author, Dr Richard Furst, but he was unavailable that day because he was a witness in a murder trial in Sydney.
Yardley is likely to face a custodial sentence, with ACT Supreme Court judges having regularly said in recent months that offenders involved in the child abuse material trade deserve to spend time behind bars.
They have said that even the mere possession and viewing of such videos and photos fuels the market for them, and provides an incentive for those who are sexually abusing children in order to produce the material to continue.
Yardley left court clutching a bright pink reusable shopping bag following the delay in his case and threatened a reporter from The Canberra Times who took his photo, growling: "I'll smash it. I'll smash the camera."
His sentencing proceedings are set to resume on December 10.
