A Fife man who said he “accidentally” downloaded more than 1,000 child abuse videos has been convicted by a jury.
David Soutar was found guilty of taking or making indecent images of children.
The 55-year-old had admitted to police he had the sick files on his second-hand Lenovo laptop and one of his six external hard drives but said he deleted them as soon as he saw the vile descriptive names.
It took only an hour for the majority of jurors at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court to convict him after a two-day trial.
Sheriff Elizabeth McFarlane remanded Soutar, who will be sentenced on February 2 when a social work report has been compiled.
She told him custody is “inevitable.”
Haul included 1970s abuse video
The court heard evidence from a cybercrime police specialist who forensically examined Soutar’s computing equipment.
He explained the files had been deleted from both the laptop and hard drive, so were inaccessible to police.
However, traces of their existence remained and police were able to deduce from the horrifically descriptive names they were illicit filth.
File names uncovered by police suggested some of the images and videos related to incest and at least one title Soutar downloaded suggested the abuse had been recorded in the 1970s and had been converted from VHS.
The officer explained if all the video files on Soutar’s devices were played back-to-back, the run-time would be three days.
Denied being a paedophile
In a police interview which was shown to jurors, Soutar explained he had been trying to download instructions for programming language C++.
Soutar had told police in the interview he was not a paedophile.
He opted not to give evidence at his trial.
His solicitor David McLaughlin put it to jurors his client had inadvertently downloaded files with CP or CPP in the titles, believing it to be related to his innocent search, but instead found “child pornography”.
In the photographs and videos police were able to analyse, male and female children from the ages of one to 15 were being abused.
The files contained abuse being committed by both adults and children and one image featured a girl who had been bound by cord.
Furthermore, police were able to analyse the laptop’s list of most recently viewed video files.
Video viewed eight days before arrest
The list of the last ten file names was highly incriminating but as the videos had been deleted, police were not able to confirm if the contents were as vile as the names suggested.
The last video – since deleted – had been viewed at 12.25am, eight days before his arrest.
Police with a warrant to raid Soutar’s former home at Lomond Gardens in Methil attended shortly after 8am on October 10 in 2019.
The cybercrime officer who examined the devices between May and June in 2020 was unable to pinpoint exactly when the content had been downloaded.
Therefore, Soutar – now of Falcon Road in Buckhaven – was convicted of taking or making the files between December 2014 – when the hard drive was manufactured – and the date of his arrest.
In total, evidence of 1,117 of the worst category of videos and 88 of the most explicit images was found.
Another 285 category B videos and 84 category B images, as well as 233 category C videos and 306 category C images were established to have existed.
Prison ‘inevitable’
Sheriff McFarlane said: “You have been found guilty of this offence by a jury of your peers and given the number of images involved in this matter and the period of time involved, ultimately there will be no alternative but to sentence you to a period of imprisonment.
“I think the outcome is inevitable.”
The sheriff placed Soutar, whose only previous conviction was a traffic matter, on the Sex Offenders Register.
Mr McLaughlin added: “He’s well aware of the disposals of the court.”
