A retired BBC sound engineer has been sentenced after a National Crime Agency investigation found him in possession of over 58,000 indecent images of children.

David Mundy, 85, from Esher, was arrested by NCA officers on 13 April 2022 after attempting to download illegal content.

He was subsequently found to have not only searched for indecent images of children, but stored thousands of them on floppy discs, CDs, USBs and hard drives. His offending covered two decades.

Forty-seven digital storage devices were seized during a search of Mundy's home address. 

Thirty-one were found to contain indecent images of children, and many had been labelled to indicate their contents. 

This included Micro SDs marked "Misc = boy undone"; "Franze, Czech etc. lots" and "several vid+pix", as well as a bag of discs, 124 of which contained illegal material.

Mundy had accessed illegal content online that involved children as young as six years old, though the majority of the images involved boys between eight and fifteen. 

He used a peer to peer sharing system to obtain this material, though he stated that he didn't communicate with other members of the groups he used.

At his address, NCA officers also found non-digital evidence of Mundy's offending – including a 15-page double sided booklet called "sensitive content movies" sorted by keywords, and several how-to guides on accessing the dark web and ensuring anonymity online. He claimed he had yet to use them.

Mundy was charged the following year with three offences relating to indecent images of children.

When interviewed, Mundy admitted to first looking at sexual images of children shortly before retiring from the BBC in 1998. 

Stating that he was unsure what the definition of abuse was, he argued that his interest was only "in pleasure". Almost 2,500 images found on his devices were category A, the most extreme.

Mundy pleaded guilty to all three offences. Today, 29 April 2024, he was sentenced at Guildford Crown Court to 10 months imprisonment.

Adam Priestley, NCA Senior Manager, said: "Despite clear evidence showing the scale of his offending, and the horrific nature of the content he repeatedly accessed, Mundy told officers that the images he had saved simply showed kids enjoying themselves.

"This could not be further from the truth. Behind each image is a vulnerable child who has been violated and abused for the benefit of offenders like Mundy.

"We at the NCA are committed to protecting children and ensuring that individuals who collect this material, creating a demand for abuse content, are held to account."