Britain’s worst ever paedophile
Grammar school boy had up to 200 victims He boasted online and gave other perverts tips
BRITAIN’S worst paedophile who attacked up to 200 children some as young as six months old was last night facing life behind bars.
Richard Huckle, 30, was only 19 when he started backpacking around the world preying on youngsters in South-East Asia, where he amassed more than 20,000 images of child abuse which he sold for profit.
Working as an English teacher and a photographer in Malaysia, the middleclass former grammar school boy from Kent infiltrated impoverished communities targeting care homes and orphanages where he filmed himself raping children and babies, awarding himself ‘PedoPoints’ for his depravity.
Once a poster boy for the British Council in Malaysia after he starred in a promotional video about the English teaching course he did there, Huckle used private tuition as a means to gain access to vulnerable children in Malaysia and Cambodia, where many worshipped him.
He offered to take photographs for children’s birthday parties and even used his cover as an amateur photographer to snap the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2012 during their visit to a park in Kuala Lumpur, where he was later to take scores of his victims.
The predator bragged of his attacks in online blogs and wrote a 60-page perverts’ handbook entitled Pedophiles & Poverty: Child Lover Guide, advising others how to groom victims, ply them with alcohol and avoid detection.
Huckle had just ‘crowd-funded’ his first child sex video and was hoping to turn the abuse into a ‘commercial enterprise’ at the time of his arrest, the Old Bailey heard.
He was only caught when police in Queensland, Australia, uncovered a network of paedophiles on the dark web using a child porn website which linked him to a number of other dangerous offenders including an Australian child killer in the Philippines. He was arrested by the National Crime Agency (NCA) when he flew back from Malaysia to Britain to visit his family for Christmas.
But Britain’s crime fighting agency faced criticism last night for waiting 16 months after his arrest in December 2014 to travel to Malaysia to inform the children’s carers about the abuse.
And it was accused of failing to inform Malaysian officials as soon it was tipped off by Australian police about his offences earlier in 2014. The NCA refused yesterday to say how long it knew about his offences after the tip-off by the Australians.
Huckle now faces up to 22 life sentences after admitting 71 charges, including rape, sexual assault, and sexual activity with a child in what investigators say is the worst case of its kind.
The case can be reported for the first time after Judge Peter Rook QC lifted reporting restrictions yesterday at the start of a three-day sentencing hearing.
The bearded paedophile sat with his head in his hands in the dock as the court heard how he set up a website to crowdfund his sickening acts.
Investigators were stunned by the unprecedented scale of the offences he had committed from the age of 19.
As a shy Christian teenager growing up in his hometown of Ashford, the loner appeared to be devoted to children, lavishing gifts on youngsters he met at churches.
But neighbours described him as ‘strange’, always wearing black clothing and eyeliner and spending hours on his computer. The son of a council engineer, Huckle enjoyed a comfortable upbringing and had ambitions to become a professional photographer or teacher.
His parents urged him to take up a career in computing while his local priest advised him to go to bible college in order to take up a position in the church.
But instead he used his photography skills to catalogue his horrific crimes. When his parents learnt of his crimes following his arrest, they threw him out of the family home, telling him they never wanted to see him again.
Yesterday prosecutor Brian O’Neill, QC, said he used local churches, where he helped out at Sunday schools, ‘as a stepping stone’ to further his abuse abroad.
Investigators suspect he may have attempted to groom victims in the UK, but Huckle found it was easier to target youngsters abroad where he feared no intervention from police, carers or even his victims’ parents, who allowed their children to be taken away for tuition even when they were terrified of him.
Huckle bragged that: ‘Impoverished kids are definitely much, much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids.’
He forced some victims whom he abused for years to pose with sick slogans advertising his foul images which he sold for the online currency bitcoins. Huckle bragged that he was a ‘rags to riches story’ because he made money from the poor, saying: ‘My first video has successfully sold raising 105 per cent of the asking price.’
He said of one of his victims: ‘I’d hit the jackpot, a three-year- old girl as loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care.’
Investigators found 20,253 indecent photographs on his computer including images of a baby wearing a nappy being assaulted. His cam-
‘Impoverished kids are easier to seduce’ ‘Nobody seemed to care’
paign of abuse stretched between March 2006 and December 2014.
Huckle was due to face three trials as it was thought the material would be too much for one jury to cope with. But he pleaded guilty to 71 charges relating to 23 victims aged between six months and 12 years old. Investigators found a ledger where he awarded himself 1,305 points based on his attacks, indicating that he had abused hundreds of children.
Huckle is thought to be only the third British man convicted under a recent law that allows the UK prosecution of ‘sex tourists’.
NCA head of operations Tony Cook branded Huckle a ‘depraved individual’.