Paedophile had 180,000 child abuse images he collected over 10 years

Robin Moffat even doctored some of them by superimposing his and a young girl's faces in before adding sick speech bubbles.

A reclusive pervert spent a decade amassing a vile collection of almost 180,000 child abuse images.

Jobless Robin Moffat, 61, even altered some of them by Photoshopping a specific young girl’s face in.

He pasted her head on top of the victim’s in the original picture and then stuck his own face over the abuser’s before adding sick speech bubbles depicting himself assaulting her.

Teesside Crown Court heard Moffat ‘lived in his own world’ after becoming unemployed in the nineties and ‘sought solace’ by amassing indecent images of children.

When Cleveland Police’s online paedophile squad raided Moffat’s Stockton home last November they also discovered he had downloaded more than 1,000 extreme porn images featuring sex acts with animals.

Officers seized various devices including a laptop, computer tower, hard drive and two phones on November 15.

Analysis of them revealed still and moving images depicting the abuse of children ranging from toddlers to teenagers, with one clip lasting nearly two hours.

Prosecutor Jenny Haigh told the court the young girl, now an adult, whose face was superimposed onto some of the images has undergone counselling since finding out what Moffat did.

In a statement read out in court the woman described suffering night terrors, adding: ‘I’m not the same person as I was before this.’

She said the police had no way of knowing whether the pictures had been shown to other paedophiles.

Moffat admitted making more than 28,000 indecent photographs of children, including 6,077category A images – the most serious kind depicting penetrative sex.

This was a mere ‘sample’ of the 177,112 pictures found.

He also admitted one charge of possessing 89 prohibited images of children and one of possessing 1,112 images of extreme pornography involving adults and animals.

Michele Turner, defending, said Moffat had been socially isolated since he was a child, more so since he was made redundant from a senior retail job in the 1990s.

‘He lives in his own world,’ she said.

‘He shuts the door. He doesn’t have to deal with people outside. He doesn’t have to deal with his inadequacies as he sees them.’

Moffat was said to have health problems, anxiety, depression and disorders which ‘perhaps should have been investigated a lot sooner’.

Ms Turner argued a prison sentence would leave him at risk of coming out homeless and without rehabilitation.

But Judge Stephen Ashurst jailed him for four years after hearing the ‘extreme’ case.

‘For many years you’ve lived a somewhat isolated and lonely life,’ he told Moffat.

‘But you’ve chosen to take solace in seeking out and keeping this vast quantity of indecent images of children.

‘The nature of the images describe, I’m afraid, very extreme sexual activity. They are particularly gross.’

The judge said Moffat manipulated some of the images ‘in the most appalling way’ to feature the young girl’s picture – ‘a quite separate and distinct departure’ from an already unhealthy interest.

He added: ‘I have seldom come across a case of such nature where the impact of what you’ve done has been so extreme.’