An-ex BBC employee has been given a 10-month prison sentence after being found with 60,000 indecent images of children as young as six. Former sound engineer, David Mundy, 85, from Esher in Surrey, was arrested on April 13 last year.
He told officers the images just ‘showed kids enjoying themselves’. As well as searching for indecent images of children, he stored thousands of them on floppy discs, CDs, USBs and hard drives. He was caught by the National Crime Agency (NCA) while trying to download the content.
His offending spanned two decades before officers seized 47 digital storage devices during a search of Mundy’s home. Of these, 31 were found to contain indecent images of children, and many had been labelled according to their contents.
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This included Micro SDs marked ‘Misc = boy undone’; ‘Franze, Czech etc. lots’ and ‘several vid+pix’, as well as a bag of discs, 124 of which had indecent material.
Mundy had accessed the content online that involved kids as young as six, though the majority of the images involved boys between eight and 15. He used a peer to peer sharing system to obtain the content.
He said he didn’t communicate with other members of the groups he used. At his home, NCA officers also found non-digital evidence of Mundy’s offending – including a 15-page double sided booklet called ‘sensitive content movies’ sorted by keywords, and several how-to guides on accessing the dark web and ensuring anonymity online. He claimed he had not yet used them.
Mundy was charged the following year with three offences relating to indecent images of children. During his interview, he confessed to first looking at sexual images of children just before retiring from the BBC in 1998.
Mundy also argued that he was unsure what the definition of abuse was, claiming that his interest was only ‘in pleasure’. Almost 2,500 images found on his devices were category A, the most extreme. Mundy pleaded guilty to all three offences. He was sentenced at Guildford Crown Court to 10 months imprisonment on Monday (April 29).
Adam Priestley, NCA Senior Manager, said: “Despite clear evidence showing the scale of his offending, and the horrific nature of the content he repeatedly accessed, Mundy told officers that the images he had saved simply showed kids enjoying themselves.
“This could not be further from the truth. Behind each image is a vulnerable child who has been violated and abused for the benefit of offenders like Mundy. We at the NCA are committed to protecting children and ensuring that individuals who collect this material, creating a demand for abuse content, are held to account.”
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