An evil predator who abused around 200 children was murdered by a fellow prisoner who claims to have acted in 'poetic justice'. Richard Huckle who's been dubbed the UK's worst paedophile was sentenced to 22 life sentences for his heinous crimes.
The despicable photographer posed as a 'devout Christian' and would travel abroad to rape children in poor communities, some of which were as young as six months old. Huckle's disturbing crimes were so horrific, that even his own parents begged for officials to lock him up forever, the Stoke Sentinel reports.
However, the monster ended up only serving a fraction of his sentence after inmate Paul Fitzgerald murdered him in a 'prolonged attack designed to humiliate and degrade him' at HMP Full Sutton on October, 13 2019. Before his death, there had been uproar that his sentence was too lenient and fears were rising that he could be released within his lifetime.
Huckle was born on May 14 1986 and led an ordinary family life in Ashford, Kent which makes it difficult to work out why he took such a dark turn. He was known as the 'gap year paedophile' and was estimated to have abused 200 children during his trips abroad.
At school he was described as a "bit of a loner" but "nothing out of the ordinary" by friends. After leaving education, Huckle became a TEFL (Teacher of English as a Second Language) teacher and like many decided to combine this with his love for travelling.
His crimes began at a young age after he set off across the world for his gap year at nineteen-years-old. The serial sex offender went to to attack girls, boys, toddlers and even a six-month-old baby over the course of nine years.
He would pose as a travel photographer and then take explicit photos of his abuse which he sold on to other paedophiles. He even boasted of his vile crimes to other paedophile and wrote a 60 page guide to sexual abuse which he called 'Pedophiles & Poverty: Child Lover Guide'.
In it, he wrote: "I'd hit the jackpot, a three-year-old girl as loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care." He bragged online: "Impoverished kids are definitely much, much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids."
During a trip to Cambodia in 2006, systematically raped two sisters, aged four and six. After spending some time in Vietnam and Cambodia, he moved to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia in 2011 and enrolled as a student at the Metropolitan University.
During this time, he was granted access to orphanages and schools where he posed as a freelance photographer. Once a level of trust had been established between Huckle and the staff caring for the kids, he would take the most vulnerable children on days out or assist them with English or photography lessons.
The monster scored the scale of abuse that each young victim suffered and from these sick notes, police have estimated he targeted around 200 children. He was finally captured in December 2014 when he flew home to the UK to spend Christmas with his family and was instead brought into custody as part of a huge international operation.
Telling his fellow child abusers that he would be out of action over the Christmas period, Huckle was arrested at Gatwick Airport. However, the twisted rapist was released on bail because he had no criminal record.
Having initially denied all of the claims to his parents, Huckle gave a drunken confession to his family that he had sex with 'young children' during his stay in Asia. His horrified parents kicked him out and phoned the police which led to his second arrest.
At an initial hearing at the Old Bailey on January 6, 2016 Huckle pleaded not guilty to 91 charges involving child abuse. Detectives were able to access a tiny percentage of the abuse on his laptop after advanced encoding kept 'the vast majority' of evidence hidden away.
In April 2016, during a preliminary trial hearing, Huckle pleaded guilty to 71 of the 91 charges he was facing and on June 6, he faced justice for all the misery and pain he had inflicted on so many. The judge sentenced him to 22 life sentences with a minimum of 25 years to be served before eligibility for parole while Huckle stood with his hands clasped together in prayer.
His sentence was short lived after he was found dead in a cell on October 13, 2019 at 33-years-old. Another prisoner, Paul Fitzgerald had murdered him during a brutal 78-minute attack as he said he wanted the monster to feel what his victims had felt.
Disturbingly, he said he would have liked to have cooked and eaten parts of Huckle's body and would have gone on to kill more inmates but was 'having too much fun'. He tied him up, raped him and strangled him with so much force his hands later required treatment before beating him and stabbing him in the neck.
Fitzgerald is said to have inserted the pen so far up into Huckle's nostril that it penetrated the bone and went into his brain. Sentencing the psychopathic Fitzgerald, Mr Justice Lavender said: “You intended to rape and kill Mr Huckle and, if possible, cook parts of him and eat them.
"You did this for your own pleasure and also to inflict what you called 'poetic justice' on a convicted paedophile. The attack lasted over an hour and a quarter.
"At the end of which Mr Huckle was either dead or dying. Describing the events afterwards, you said: 'I got carried away by how much fun I was having doing what I was doing to him.'"
Hull Crown Court heard that Fitzgerald, who has an anti-social personality disorder, had previous convictions for violent and sexual offences which started from the age of 13-years-old. The judge said the only mitigating features of the case were the killer's mental health problems which were caused by the physical and sexual abuse he suffered as a child.
Fitzgerald appeared at the sentencing hearing by video link to prison, wearing rosary beads and with a shaven head and long, goatee beard. He appeared unbothered during the sentencing as he yawned, laughed and stretched his arms out while the judge passed his life sentence.
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