Locations
Land Street, Elgin, Moray, IV30
Description
Mark Whitton jailed for 40 months over vast child abuse material haul
Mark Whitton, a 56-year-old from Land Street in Elgin, Moray, has been sentenced to 40 months in prison after police found more than 40,000 indecent images of children and over 12 days’ worth of child abuse videos at his home.
Whitton appeared at Inverness Sheriff Court on Tuesday 18 August, where Sheriff Ian Cruickshank imposed the sentence (discounted for a guilty plea and backdated to July). He was also made subject to a seven-year sexual harm prevention order restricting his internet access and contact with children, and will remain on the sex offenders register indefinitely.
Officers executed a search warrant at his address in October 2025. Whitton told them: “everything is over for me.” He admitted having three hard drives containing images of children. In total, investigators recovered 41,077 images of child sexual abuse and 2,316 videos whose combined runtime exceeded 302 hours (more than 12 days). Material included infants as young as one year old.
A further 418 images and 985 videos of extreme pornography were found, with a total runtime of more than 511 hours (over 21 days). Much of this material depicted bestiality.
Fiscal depute Emily Hood told the court that a laptop belonging to Whitton contained 152 inaccessible images, including AI-generated pictures of boys and girls aged between one and 14. The images showed children engaged in sexual activity with adults and other children, graded as 24 Category A (the most serious), 23 Category B and 105 Category C.
Analysis of the hard drives revealed thousands more images and videos across Categories A, B and C, including accessible and inaccessible files of children aged from three to 14. One hard drive alone held more than 16,000 inaccessible images and hundreds of videos of child abuse, plus extreme pornography involving animals. Another contained nearly 1,000 accessible videos of children “engaging in sexual posing,” while a third held over 19,000 accessible images and more than 1,000 videos of child sexual abuse material, again alongside bestiality content. Ms Hood described some of the extreme material as “of women engaging activity with animals, mostly dogs.”
Whitton is now listed on our sex offenders database.