A Fife man caught with more than 90,000 illegal images and videos was storing them on hard drives taken from old Sky boxes.
Gary Gray had amassed the collection over a period of 15 years.
Officers who searched his house found a server running in the garage and dozens of hard drives containing the vile images.
The 59-year-old had also downloaded child abuse pictures, found while searching for the extreme porn.
Asked by Sheriff James Williamson how Gray had come to have so many images, his solicitor responded: “There’s reference to the fact that they had come from computers he repaired for other people.
“He appears to tinker about with computers.
“There were a lot of hard drives which had been taken from Sky boxes he bought on eBay.”
Community sentence provisions
At Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court he was given a community-based sentence after the sheriff heard he was unlikely to offend again.
Sheriff Williamson said a social work report did not characterise Gray as someone with an interest in children.
He said: “I can deal with you without sending you to prison but it will be a significant community payback order.”
He placed Gray on a three-year supervision order and ordered him to take part in the Moving Forward, Making Changes offenders programme.
He must live in approved accommodation and is barred from owning more than one laptop and phone.
He was also placed on the Sex Offenders Register for three years.
Police found 34 hard drives
The court previously heard police, acting on a tip-off about illegal downloads, searched Gray’s home in July 2021.
Devices, including a running server and a “large number” of hard drives, were found in his garage.
When asked by officers what type of system the server was, he replied: “It’s full of hard drives with porn on them.
“They are mine. Everything in that garage belongs to me.”
Police seized 62 devices including 34 hard drives and found 75,692 images and 15,208 videos showing extreme porn.
The court was told some showed the extreme torture of women but the majority involved bestiality between adults and various species of animals.
Also recovered were 274 images of child abuse ranging from category A to C, with all but three category A images inaccessible.
There were 13 category A videos, 10 of which were accessible.
Fiscal depute Douglas Thomson said: “The Crown recognises that the accused’s principal interest was in respect of the recovered bestiality and sado-masochism images but in searching for this he received and retained the lesser number of images of child sexual abuse.”
Child abuse images were ‘incidental’
Gray, of Burntisland, admitted possessing extreme pornography at his home address between October 2006 and July 2021 and child abuse images between October 2009 and July 2021.
A not guilty plea to a charge of taking or making indecent images of children was accepted by the Crown.
Solicitor Elaine Buist told the court on Monday that while not seeking to minimise the offence of possessing child abuse images, her client was clear this was not his main interest.
She said they were “incidental” to his main searches.
“He tells me there is no chance he will be looking at anything such as this again.
“He can’t change the past but he can change who he is in the future.
“His life is destroyed by it.
“There have been repercussions for him and his family, living in the community.
“He’s committed to learning as much as he can and moving forward in a positive fashion.”
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