A freed sex offender is back behind bars after he admitted to social workers that he had started to amass a second stash of horror child abuse images.
Anthony Sheridan was jailed in 2015 for more than two years after being caught with more than 13,000 sick pics of kids – a sentence later reduced to 18 months on appeal and from which he walked free after just nine months.
That sentence left him on licence for a further three-and-a-half years – but in April last year during a routine appointment with social workers monitoring him in the community he admitted he had been downloading indecent images again.
A police raid on his property in Dundee revealed he had hundreds of images stored on his computer and had been using file erasing software to cover his tracks.
His release licence was revoked and Sheridan was sent back to serve out the remainder of his previous sentence.
And now Sheridan faces a further jail term when he returns to Dundee Sheriff Court for sentence next month.
Fiscal depute Chris McIntosh told Dundee Sheriff Court that some of the search terms used by Sheridan on his computer indicated he was searching for images of children as young as eight.
He added: “The locus was searched by officers and a silver HP laptop was seized.
“A total of 359 indecent images – 310 of them unique – were found. A further 416 concerning images were found in a thumbcache folder.
“On April 19 2018 during a routine social work appointment the accused disclosed that he had been downloading indecent images of children.
“A breach report was submitted and the accused’s licence was revoked.”
One file, apparently featuring an eight-year-old girl, was in the same folder as his CV.
Sheridan, 39, a prisoner at HMP Perth, pleaded guilty on indictment to charges of downloading and possessing indecent images of children at an address in Dundee’s Arthurstone Terrace.
Defence solicitor Theo Finlay asked that sentence be deferred on Sheridan so the defence could investigate with psychologists whether Sheridan’s autism could have affected his offending.
He added: “He will have to serve the full sentence imposed in 2015.
“His release date from that is in September this year.”
Sheriff Alastair Brown deferred sentence for defence investigations and remanded Sheridan in custody meantime.
He said: “He has had a great deal of input and now he’s done it again.”
