He wore a freshly laundered shirt and smart dark suit for his appearance in the dock. Jamie Reynolds was also sporting a short new haircut and trim goatee beard instead of his scruffy stubble.

In truth, he looked less like the man he is — a monster now locked up in the same psychiatric unit as Moors Murderer Ian Brady — than the boy he once was: a teacher’s son from a Shropshire market town, who had enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class upbringing.

But the evidence that unfolded last week told the true story. Few defendants who have appeared at Stafford Crown Court — or any other court for that matter — could have derived such sadistic pleasure from their crimes.

Georgia Williams, 17, was murdered by Jamie Reynolds

Not only did Reynolds strangle 17-year-old policeman’s daughter Georgia Williams with a ligature, he also took pictures of her ‘before, during and after’ the killing at his home in Wellington.

They were the photographic equivalent of a ‘snuff’ movie.

Reynolds, 23, was an enthusiastic consumer of ‘snuff’ movies — where women are killed during extreme sex to satisfy sick fantasies — and other kinds of hardcore pornography.

Was this obscene pornography the cause of his depraved behaviour, or was it simply a consequence of it?

We shall never know. What the judge was in little doubt about, however, was that the material found on his computer played a part in Georgia’s murder. Material so disturbing that it could not be revealed in open court because it could cause the public ‘untold distress’.

But the reality is that such filth is just a finger click away on anyone’s computer keyboard.
Just typing the words ‘rape porn’ into Google brings up a deluge of search results from vile websites . . . ‘We have the hottest rape porn videos (our content is 100 per cent free and updated daily!)’ . . . ‘If you enjoy your rape porn with a bit of death at the end, well then click right here’ . . . ‘Sometimes you just gotta rape a b**** at gunpoint’.

 

Extreme pornography is the common denominator that links the death of Georgia Williams with those of April Jones, five, Tia Sharp, 12, and Joanna Yeates, 25.

The men, if that is the right word, who committed these notorious murders — Mark Bridger, Stuart Hazell and Vincent Tabak — were all obsessed with pornography, just like Reynolds, who is being held at maximum-security Ashworth mental hospital on Merseyside until his sentencing later this month.

Mark Bridger, a 46-year-old former soldier, was jailed for life earlier this year for April Jones’s murder and abduction. Before killing April, who was from Powys, Wales, Bridger watched children being raped and abused on his laptop.

Tia Sharpe’s killer, Stuart Hazell, also had a history of viewing child pornography online. Shortly before killing Tia, he had typed the words ‘little girls in glasses’ into his home computer. Tia wore glasses.

And Vincent Tabak, too, watched child porn. He strangled architect Joanna Yeates in Bristol. Thirty images of children being sexually abused were found on Dutch-born Tabak’s computer.

It would be easy to assume they are just isolated examples. In fact, they’re not. They are just the most high-profile; the ones we are all familiar with. Similar cases go largely unreported in courts up and down the country with alarming regularity.

Not everyone who watches this filth goes on to rape or murder, but a significant minority, like the individuals featured on these pages, do.

Janis Dundas, 62, was killed by step-grandson Jack Huxley

 

HOMELESS KILLER

One evening in April, Jack Huxley turned up on the doorstep of Janis Dundas’s one-bedroom flat in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire.

Huxley, 20, had been wandering the streets and wanted somewhere to put his head down.
Retired nurse Mrs Dundas, 62, agreed to put him up out of the goodness of her heart because he was the son of her daughter’s husband and she treated him as a blood relative.

In the middle of the night, Huxley, who was sleeping on the living-room floor, got up and spent more than three hours viewing pornography on Mrs Dundas’s computer that showed sexual activity between young men and mature women.

The following day, Mrs Dundas was discovered face-down on her bedroom floor with three kitchen knives protruding from her back. She was almost naked. Her right index finger had been nearly severed where she had attempted to defend herself.

Huxley, who fled the scene in his victim’s car, was arrested shortly afterwards. In October, at Liverpool Crown Court, he was sentenced  to life and will serve a minimum of 21 years.

The judge told him: ‘I am sure that on the night you spent some considerable time on [hardcore] websites . . . in order to arouse yourself sexually with a view to having intercourse with her [Mrs Dundas].’ It is not clear whether or not Mrs Dundas had been raped.

Recalling these events, her daughter, Jessica Knight, told how her mother’s murder had left a ‘deep and dark hole in our lives’.

Retired Irene Lawless, 67, was raped and strangled by Darren Jackson

 

THE NEIGHBOUR

Darren Jackson moved into a cul-de-sac in the village of Llanllwni in Carmarthenshire, West Wales, with his mother and stepfather in January of last year.

Three weeks later, in the early hours, he broke into the bungalow next door through a front window and raped and strangled retired shorthand typist Irene Lawless.

Shortly before he attacked 67-year-old Mrs Lawless, an accomplished portrait painter, Jackson had surfed websites such as ‘mature b**** raped by young burglar’ and ‘real brutal sex’.

In a victim impact statement read out at Swansea Crown Court, her son Jason said Jackson, 26, had ‘poisoned decades of happy life’.

‘She was a loving mother and grandmother, a really peaceful person who loved the garden, animals and her paintings,’  he said.

Jackson was jailed for life in September, 2012, and will not be considered for parole for 28 years.

Back in Llanllwni, friends and neighbours of Mrs Lawless are still trying to come to terms with what happened in this quiet corner of rural Wales.

A few months after Mrs Lawless was murdered, little April Jones was also kidnapped and killed.

‘With Irene’s murder and April Jones going missing from her home just an hour away in Machynlleth, it was an horrific time for us,’ said a young mother who lived a few doors from the pensioner.

‘Finding out afterwards that both murders were linked to the internet was quite sickening.’

Catherine Wynter, 19, was stabbed 23 times by karate instructor Tony Bushby

 

THE BOYFRIEND

Tony Bushby, a karate instructor, began dating Catherine Wynter, a church-going art student, after they became Facebook friends in 2011. He was 18, she was 19.

Not long after they’d begun dating, Bushby stabbed Catherine in a frenzied knife attack while she babysat her young niece and nephew at her sister’s home in Borehamwood. Hertfordshire.

When Catherine’s mother went to check on her the following morning, she was told by the children: ‘Grandma, Grandma, Katy’s dead.’

A trail of blood led her to the kitchen, where her daughter was lying on the kitchen floor. She had been stabbed 23 times.

At Bushby’s trial at St Albans Crown Court last year, two revelations emerged.

One was that Busby had tricked Catherine into going out with him by creating a string of fake Facebook friends who said complimentary things about him.

The other was that Busby watched  ‘rape porn’ on his computer. One of the websites featured black women. Catherine Wynter was black.

Bushby was jailed for 25 years.

‘He was living in an evil  fantasy world,’ said Catherine’s mother, 58-year-old Joy Davis, speaking from her flat in Borehamwood earlier this week.

‘Seeing my daughter in a pool of blood will haunt me until the day I die.

‘I visit her grave and I have to  keep strong for my grandchildren. They have had counselling, and I hope and pray they will come through it.’

Sylwia Ciapcinska, 24, was strangled by first-time dad Tomasz Sobczak

 

FIRST-TIME DAD

Tomasz Sobczak left his wife and newborn son behind in his native Poland to look for a job in Britain.

He found work at a fruit-picking factory in the Midlands and moved into a shared house in Burton-on-Trent.

One of the other tenants was fellow Polish national, Sylwia Ciapcinska, 24, a teacher and university graduate, who was employed in a local warehouse. Known to her friends as Magda, she came to the UK to save up enough money to build a house in her home country.

In July 2010, a few weeks after she had arrived, she disappeared. Her partially-clothed body was found wrapped in plastic and stuffed into her own black suitcase, near a viaduct.

Sobczak was arrested after hardcore pornography featuring strangulation was discovered on his laptop. Sylwia had been strangled. Sobczak is now serving life in prison.

Tia Rigg, 12, was murdered by her uncle, John Maden

 

THE UNCLE

John Maden will ‘never be freed’ from prison. For even by the standards of what you have just read, the events that took place after his niece visited him at his home in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, three years ago, were unspeakably horrific.

A neighbour saw 12-year-old Tia Rigg arrive at his front door one April afternoon. Less than an hour later, Maden dialled 999 and told the operator he had stabbed and strangled Tia.

‘I’ve just finished killing her  now,’ he said. Asked why he did such a thing, he replied: ‘Because  I felt like it.’

Police found Tia’s naked and lifeless body upstairs with her hands tied behind her back.

Maden, 37, an unemployed warehouseman, had developed an obsessive interest in violent pornography in the months leading up to Tia’s death. He downloaded pornography onto a laptop from which he made dozens of CDs featuring extreme images of bondage, rape, sadomasochism and violent sexual acts.

There was also a large collection of files stored on his mobile phone labelled ‘snuff’, ‘snuff stories’, ‘brutal rape’ and ‘extreme rape’.

Passing a life sentence on Maden at Manchester Crown Court, the judge told him: ‘It is inescapable that Tia Rigg died because you decided to realise your fantasies about torturing and killing a young child.’ He told him he would never be released.

‘It was a very upsetting case, and one that people in this area still remember with revulsion,’ said local MP Graham Stringer.

Jane Longhurst, 31, was strangled by her best friend's partner Graham Coutts

 

BEST FRIEND’S PARTNER

Perhaps no case epitomises the pernicious influence of violent online pornography more that of Jane Longhurst.

Jane, 31, a special needs teacher from Brighton, went missing on March  14, 2003.

Five weeks later, her naked body was found in woodland near Pulborough, West Sussex, a pair of tights wrapped twice around her neck. A post mortem revealed she had been strangled.

Graham Coutts, the partner of her best friend, was convicted of  her murder.

Coutts fed his sick fantasies of strangulation and necrophilia by visiting the most hideous, explicit and extreme websites. They had such names as ‘hanging b****es’ and ‘necrobabes’.

‘I’d support anything — any action — that might in future stop another family experiencing the same nightmare as me,’ said Jane’s  82-year-old mother, Liz Longhurst, who lives in Reading.

‘But I worry that we’ll never get rid of the sick sites that attracted individuals like Mark Bridger, Stuart Hazell and Jamie Reynolds.’