A HAVERFORDWEST man who made almost 300 indecent category A images of children as young as five has been sentenced by a Crown Court Judge who has described his behaviour as ‘absolutely stomach churning’.
“These are not images, but they are real children who are being sexually abused and their lives completely ruined,” Judge Paul Thomas told Paul Andrew Godbold when he was sentenced at Swansea Crown Court this afternoon.
“ These images are then viewed by people like you to masturbate over.
“Without you, there wouldn’t be a market for people to trade.”
Investigations into Godbold’s paedophilia commenced in April 2021 when police visited his former home in Llawhaden and executed a search warrant.
They removed several items for forensic examination including a mobile phone which was found to contain a total of 543 indecent images of children. 276 were the most extreme Section A images, 139 were section B and 128 were section C. Some of the children were as young as five or six years old.
Officers also discovered two extreme pornographic moving images involving bestiality.
The digital material discovered on Godbold’s phone was associated with ‘Keepsake’ which is a secure vault application which is kept privately from a phone’s accessibility via a pin number.
Officers also discovered ‘Telegram’, which is used to convey messages and share files. Godbold was found to have used the words ‘young’ in his website searches as well as ‘pthc’, which stands for pree-teen hard core.
Godbold, of Spring Grove, Haverfordwest, initially denied all responsibility for the images. He said his phone was accessible to his wife as well as his builder, with the result that further investigations had to be carried out by the investigative officers.
This, said Judge Thomas, amounted to ‘a wild goose chase’.
Police interviewed Godbold a second time in June 2022, but once again he denied all involvement.
He first appeared in Swansea Crown Court on October 19, 2022, when he denied three charges of making indecent images of children between 2019 and 2021 and a fourth charge of possessing an extreme pornographic image involving a dog.
The trial was listed to take place on February 22 however the day before, Godbold changed all pleas to guilty.
Imposing sentence, Judge Thomas KC informed Godbold that if it hadn’t been for the fact that the defendant had admitted to ‘needing help and specialist programmes’ to help him address his interest in child pornography, Godbold would have been served a custodial sentence.
As a result of his admission, he was sentenced to ten months in prison suspended for two years.
He must carry out a Horizon accredited programme and a rehabilitation requirement and must complete 160 hours of unpaid work.
He will be placed on the sex offenders’ register for ten years and was made subject to a sexual harm prevention order, which will remain in place for five years.
