A man who turned photographs of children into “utterly chilling” images showing depravity ranging from bestiality to beheadings has been handed a lengthy jail sentence.
Egerton man Hugh Nelson, 27, was brought before Bolton Crown Court this week to learn his fate after a ground-breaking police investigation into his crimes.
The Honorary Recorder for Bolton Judge Martin Walsh said it was “impossible to know” if any children had been raped because of his actions but reminded him of their real-world impact.
He said: “There seems to be no limit to the depths of depravity exhibited in the images that you were prepared to create and exhibit to others.”
He added: “This was not simply some form of perverted and grotesque fantasy.”
Dressed in a pink T-shirt and black jacket, Nelson looked on via video link from prison as Judge Walsh laid the scale of his crimes bare.
The court had previously heard from prosecutor David Toal how Nelson had created sickening images and encouraged the rape of children through online messages from his bedroom.
The images ranged from “beatings, smotherings, hangings, drownings, beheadings, necro, beast”, all created using computer software for a fee for online users.
Nelson’s crimes were committed between June 2021 and June 2023 before he was caught out by an undercover police officer.
This was part of an investigation, dubbed "Operation Influence", into "the creation and developing trends of AI in relation to child sexual exploitation."
At this time Nelson was the “administrator” of an internet chatroom for adults with a “sexual interest in young children.”
Nelson told the undercover officer that he “took commission from people” and had created over 60,000 “characters” using Daz 3D software, whose ages ranged from six months to middle age.
He sent eight images to the officers, seven showing graphic images of child sexual activity and later told him he was working on computer-generated images of a girl being abused in a nursery.
Judge Walsh said: “You indicated to the officer that you were able to prepare what you described as a ‘prologue’, that is a scenario in which a child within a family is sexually abused.”
Nelson later sent him a link to a cloud storage folder with 299 images of children being raped or sexually abused.
Some of these images showed these children being injured or beheaded.
He told the officer that since most people could not sexually abuse their “niece or daughter” he believed “the way I see it, I provide a valuable service".
He apparently commissioned a fee of £80 for this “service.”
Nelson was arrested at his family home on Briggs Fold Road, Egerton after which further investigations showed the chilling messages he had sent out.
Judge Walsh said: “The nature and content of the communications you entered into is utterly chilling.”
He was found to have spoken with a man in Italy in June 2021 about a nine-year-old girl in highly explicit sexualised terms and to have asked for pictures of her.
The man commissioned Nelson to create an image of the girl “being kidnapped in a van and raped".
Nelson also exchanged messages about abusing an underaged girl in France and appeared to graphically encourage the man at the other end to abuse her.
He then exchanged similar messages about a nine-year-old girl in America and was “commissioned” to create images of her in sexual scenes.
Judge Walsh said it was “impossible” to tell if these were in fact real children, but there was evidence that at least one of them was genuine.
Nelson had also tried to incite a 15-year-old he was speaking to online, also in America, to sexual activity and asked for sexual images.
While searching Nelson’s devices, the police also found various indecent images, some of them he had distributed to other people online.
These included 56 of the most serious or “category A” images, with 16 category B and 47 category C images.
Nelson was found to have had a total of 1,391 prohibited images and was arrested again in September 2023.
For the first set of crimes, involving his talks with the undercover officer, he pleaded guilty to four counts of distributing indecent images of children and to publishing an obscene article.
For the second set he eventually pleaded guilty to three counts of encouraging offences, in each case the rape of a child under 13, and to attempting to incite a child under 16 to sex.
Nelson also admitted to three counts of distributing indecent photographs of children, three counts of making indecent images of children and possessing prohibited images of children.
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The court had previously heard from Bob Elias, defending, how Nelson was a “shy, gauche” you man who was “living on takeaways paid for by these vile images.”
Mr Elias said that Nelson had “desperately wanted validation” from others online.
He said: “The whole activity smacks of manipulation and role play by some cruel and nasty people on this defendant.”
But Judge Walsh ruled that Nelson posed a “very high risk” to the public and reminded the court of the “extreme” nature of the images.
He jailed Nelson for 18 years, with an extended licence period of six years and ordered that he sign the sex offenders register for life.
Judge Walsh also hit him with an indefinite sexual harm prevention order.
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