A sex offender who tried to cover his tracks by hiding his phone under his mattress has been jailed after police found more than 40,000 child abuse images.

John Norman was tracked down by the National Crime Agency after they were tipped off by the operators of a New Zealand based file sharing and cloud storage site.

His vast online library of illegal movies and still images included 19,205 which fell into the worst category and showed boys aged up to ten suffering abuse that amounted to rape. Many were in obvious pain or distress.

The youngest child was a new born baby who appeared to be dead. In addition to the 42,000 items viewed by the police there were another 40,000 suspicious

Norman started amassing his collection shortly after being released in 2019 from a three year sentence for sexually assaulting a ten-year-old boy.

He tried to outwit the police when they tracked him down through his IP address to a rented house in Loddiswell, near Kingsbridge by hiding one phone under his mattress and wiping a second by taking it back to factory settings.

He claimed there was no password on a tablet computer when in fact there was, but police were able to open it an access the enormous cache of material on the Mega NZ site. They had already shut down one account but he opened another in a false name and used it to store the films and images.

Norman, aged 46, of Loddiswell, admitted making or possessing indecent or prohibited images of children and was jailed for a year and ten months by Judge James Adkins at Exeter Crown Court. He was made subject to a sexual harm prevention order for 30 years.

The judge told him: “An aggravating feature of this case if your relevant previous conviction in 2017 for a contact offence. There were a very substantial number of images accumulated over a long period of time.

“You used cloud storage and tried to avoid police scrutiny by re-setting an iPhone. Some of the material was of very young children and some of them demonstrated discernible pain. Many of the images were moving. It seems to me that the passage of time has done nothing to diminish your appetite for this material.”

Mr Herc Ashworth, prosecuting, said the National Crime Agency identified Norman as the user of the Mega NZ cloud system who was storing a large number of illegal items and raided his home in Loddiswell on March 19 last year.

He had wiped his iPhone by the time they arrested him and officers found a PIN protected tablet and a second phone hidden under his mattress. A partial download of his phone revealed 19,205 items at the worst category A, 9,250 at B and 14,550 at the lowest level C, which showed child nudity and sexual posing. Another 427 category A images were found on the tablet.

The items on the cloud had been stored systematically and were almost all of boys aged from birth to ten, some in obvious pain or distress. There was an image on a new born baby who appeared to be dead.

Mr William Parkhill, defending, said Norman is an HGV driver but had struggled to live a normal life after his release from prison because he lost his job or housing on several occasions when people learned of his conviction.

He had suffered from stress and wanted to seek help but was unable to afford private counselling or treatment. He will find custody very difficult to cope with.