A PERVERTED sports coach used photo-editing software to alter innocent pictures of south Warwickshire schoolgirls to make it appear they were taking part in sex acts with him.
The doctored images were among hundreds of other indecent images of children Matthew Williams had downloaded onto his family laptop – where they were found by his horrified wife.
She reported her discovery to Shipston High School, where Williams worked as a sports coach – and the police were contacted, Warwick Crown Court has heard.
The 50-year-old, who lived in Shipston at the time, but now of Foundry Road, Kingswinford, West Midlands, pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent images of children.
He was jailed for eight months and ordered to register as a sex offender for ten years.
Prosecutor Nicholas Berry said the case concerned Williams’ use of a computer, which was also used by his wife and two sons, over a period between July 2015 and December 2018.
His marriage had been under a strain after he had had an affair, and in December 2018 his wife began to suspect that he was having another affair.
So when he was out one night, she checked their laptop computer and came across a file which could not be viewed without the use of a memory stick.
There was one by the laptop, and when she looked at its contents, she found at least two folders which contained thumbnail images of female children.
There were also close-up pictures of him exposing himself in their living room – some of which had been doctored to make it appear girls were performing or about to perform sex acts on him.
The images also had comments attached to them naming the children pictured by their correct names, said Mr Berry.
Williams worked as a sports coach at Shipston High School and other schools in south Warwickshire, and some of the girls attended those schools, although they were not coached by him.
His wife reported what she had found to Shipston High School, as a result of which the police were contacted and he was arrested at the family home later that day.
The computer and memory stick were seized, and the police found just over 500 indecent images of children, including six ‘pseudo-images’ in which innocent images of girls taken from legitimate sources had been doctored to make it appear they were taking part in sex acts with Williams.
And when he was interviewed, Williams admitted using photo-editing software to alter the pictures, for which he accepted there was a sexual motivation, added Mr Berry.
Graeme Simpson, defending, said Williams, who was now in another relationship, has been in contact with the Lucy Faithful Foundation, which works with sex offenders, and also receiving therapy from another organisation.
Jailing Williams, Judge Sylvia de Bertodano told him: “This collection of images you collected over three years was kept on your family computer, used not only by you, but by your wife and children, aged 12 and 16. It is fortunate it was not your children who found them, but they easily could have done.
“When you look at images of children in this way, you are looking at images of real children being sexually abused.
“Your case has the added really unpleasant feature that you made pictures of children you knew, and used those legitimate pictures to turn them into sexualised pictures of those children as if they were being abused.”
