Record details
Former Exeter councillor Roger Spackman sentenced for 290,000 child abuse images
Roger Spackman, 50, of College Road, Exeter, has been given a suspended prison sentence after admitting possession and making of a vast collection of child sexual abuse images.
Spackman, a former Labour councillor for Exeter City Council’s Newtown and St Leonards ward until 2017, was tracked by police after taking part in an illegal online chat network. He pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images and two counts of possession of prohibited or extreme images.
At Exeter Crown Court he was sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years. He was also placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years and ordered to complete 40 days of rehabilitation activities.
The court heard that in 2008 Spackman joined an underground community called The Other Place, where child abuse images and sexual fantasies were shared. Police later identified his IP address from the now-removed site and raided his home, recovering 290,672 images of child sexual abuse across 68 devices. The collection included children as young as seven, among them 58 of the most serious category A images, 49 category B images, 27,407 category C images, and 8,672 indecent drawings or cartoons.
Spackman told the court he had become involved in the chats while trying to come to terms with abuse he suffered in his own childhood, and that he had at times pretended to be an abused young girl.
Judge Peter Johnson said: “In essence, you were undertaking some form of therapeutic role-play in which others invited you to take the part of the victim and sent you indecent photographs to assist in the role-play. What is troubling is the huge and remarkable number of images.”
