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A man who admitted grooming a teenage girl has been convicted of downloading indecent images of children.
Leslie Thomas Bulpin (37) was found guilty at the end of a two-day Royal Court trial yesterday and will be sentenced on 4 September, when he will also be sentenced for the child grooming charge, which he had already admitted earlier this month.
Unusually, this previous admission was known to the two Jurats judging on the downloading offence. This was because the Deputy Bailiff Robert MacRae considered that it was relevant: Bulpin made several calls to a 15-year-old girl, inviting her to his home for sex, just days after he had downloaded indecent images to his iPhone.
In May 2019, Police seized Bulpin’s phone in connection with another investigation, and found more than 2,000 pornographic images of adults in the cache. However, they also found 22 that they suspected to be of children. In court, these images were viewed and the Jurats judged that they could be sure that 13 of them were girls aged under 16, which is the legal age of consent.
Pictured: Leslie Bulpin was remanded in custody until 4 September, when he will be sentenced.
The images had all come from a popular internet pornography site called X Videos. Analysing the phone, forensic investigators found that Bulpin had carried out 182 searches on the site over three days, including entering the term ‘little girls’ on at least two occasions.
Defending Bulpin, Advocate Adam Harrison said: “No one can be sure that the girls in the images were under 16. Also, because the images were found in the cache, it did not mean he had necessarily seen them.”
He added that the fact that the website was ‘mainstream’ was evidence that Bulpin had no intention of downloading indecent images of children, because he believed that everyone featuring on this popular sites were adults.
Advocate Harrison added that the grooming offence concerned only one girl and did not mean that Bulpin would then look for child pornography online.
But the Jurats, Collette Crill and Dr Gareth Hughes, were not convinced and found Bulpin guilty. He was remanded in custody until sentencing.
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