A serial sexual predator who indulged his perverted fascination for pre-pubescent children through an obsession with computer games has been jailed.
Jordan Yardley, who is already serving a sentence after being recalled to prison, was sentenced to a further 17 and a half months in jail and told his name would remain on the sex offenders’ register for ten years.
Yardley appeared for sentence at Livingston Sheriff Court after earlier pleading guilty to possessing child pornography.
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During a spot check on 25 February last year cops found the 25-year-old had deleted 94 indecent images he downloaded onto his computer after viewing them at his home in Livingston.
Eleven of the images were in category A, showing penetrative sexual activity involving an adult or another child.
A further 17 photographs showed non-penetrative sexual activity such as solo masturbation and the remaining 65 were of children in “erotic poses” with no sexual activity involving children aged between four and 13 years of age.
Yardley was subject to an extended prison sentence of 39 months imposed in March 2019, with a custodial term of 27 months followed by 12 months post release supervision, which he breached by committing the new offence.
Following his arrest for secretly downloading the vile images, the convicted sex offender was recalled to prison and was due to be released on 9 March next week.
Sheriff Frank Crowe described Yardley as “a rather sad individual” because he didn’t have any hobbies except playing computer games.
He commented: “It seems a very short step from computer games to pre-pubescent pornography. That’s been a recurrent theme.
“He seems to focus on pre-pubescent children under the age of 13 and you can’t lead a normal life with that going on at the back of your mind. I mean it’s just not natural.
“He can’t give any explanation and it’s just a complete vacuum. He just seems very alone and anti-social”
Passing sentence, he told Yardley he was still a young man and said that, if he had been looking at the latest case in isolation, he would have imposed a community sentence.
However, he added: “What I see is you have two related previous convictions and an interest in young children which goes back to at least 2015.
“It’s a really poor social work report. You really just shrug your shoulders all the way through and there are no 'green shoots' in this report.
“You may have autistic problems but you are not a stupid man. You have some qualifications and there is still an opportunity for you.
“The worrying thing is you have no other interest at all other than computer games and that seems to lead to your interest in child pornography.
“My advice is to engage in prison and get another interest where you play a bit of football or darts – anything other than computers.
“I do fear that if you go back out into the community that same surreptitious and nasty behaviour would rear its head again.”
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Given the unavailability of intensive social work intervention due to the Covid pandemic, the sheriff said he had concluded that the only way to deal with Yardley’s offending and protect the public was to impose a custodial sentence.
Paedophile Yardley was previously jailed in 2018 for sending sick messages to what he thought was an under-age schoolgirl offering to take a her to the woods and “teach her about sex”.
He was busted after sexting the “12-year-old” girl and arranging to meet her for sex only to be confronted by paedophile hunters who streamed the encounter live on the internet.
At the time he committed that offence Yardley was still serving a community sentence for his previous offence in 2016 for possessing indecent images of children and was already a registered sex offender.
The remorseless sex beast messaged the decoy that "age was not an issue" and brazenly told the vigilantes that it “didn’t bother him” that he was a paedophile.
