A British paedophile who raped and sexually assaulted young children and posted images of the abuse on the darkweb in 2010 has been jailed for life after an international investigation finally tracked him down.
Martyn Armstrong, 50, pleaded guilty to a string of offences, including 20 counts of raping a child under the age of 13, and was jailed for life—with a minimum term of 14 years—at Cardiff Crown Court on Wednesday.
In 2010 pictures of the abuse of a toddler were first posted on a site on the darkweb called The Love Zone, used by paedophiles to share images and brag about their perverted exploits.
Three years later the Australian Federal Police referred them to Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA), believing they emanated from the United Kingdom.
The images had been digitally distorted in order to protect the identity of the perpetrator, but in 2017 investigators in Italy managed to identify him as “Martyn.”
That same year an investigator in France began work on the case and tried to identify a beach which was linked to the mysterious “Martyn.”
He researched the geology of the beach and realised it was either in Ireland or Wales, eventually identifying it as a strip of coast in Pembrokeshire, west Wales.
But the case remained unsolved until last year when the NCA created a new technique that disabled the image distortion and finally identified the faces of both the abuser and his victim.
They eventually identified the culprit as Martyn Armstrong, who had moved to Derbyshire in January 2022 after selling a house close to the exact same beach the French investigator had identified.
The NCA team worked on the name “Martyn” and established that a Martyn Armstrong had links to the beach, by matching an image from his social media profile with the abuse images.
On July 30, 2022 Armstrong was stopped on the M4 motorway by South Wales Police and arrested.
A search of his home found one of the cameras used to film the abuse, which was forensically matched to the images, and the images themselves, which were on a laptop.
Faced with the mass of evidence against him, Armstrong pleaded guilty to a string of offences when he appeared at Cardiff Crown Court in September 2022.
Victim Tells Armstrong He Was a ‘Monster’
In a victim impact statement, one of those abused, addressing Armstrong, said: “You abused me, manipulated me and have forever darkened a piece of my childhood. When I think about the type of person who could commit such horrific crimes, I feel like only a monster could ever be responsible. Never did I think that all along, the only monster was you.”Prosecutor Roger Griffiths told the court Armstrong’s face had been “obscured by zig zag distortion.”
Defence lawyer Adam Sharp said, “Mr. Armstrong does not want me to try to mitigate the depravity of his actions or the impact they had on his victims.”
Sentencing him, Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke said Armstrong had a “longstanding and continuing interest in sexual abuse of the very worst kind.”
She said, “Paedophiles around the world continue to view the images for their sexual gratification.”
NCA Operations Manager Martin Ludlow said: “It is over 17 years since Armstrong began to abuse these young children. I don’t believe he thought he would ever be caught and that the distortion techniques he used would protect him. However, the NCA and our international partners were determined to ensure his evil actions did not go unpunished.”
The NCA said three victims have been traced, offered counselling, and “safeguarded.”
Armstrong admitted 20 counts of rape of a child under 13, one count of assault by penetration, three counts of sexual assault, five counts of causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, and one count of making and one count of distributing 204 images of the most serious category of child abuse.
In November he pleaded guilty to further charges: being in possession of 4,105 child abuse images, two counts of assault by penetration, one count of sexual assault, and two counts of making and distributing child abuse images.
Ludlow said: “Our commitment to identifying him was unwavering and ultimately, NCA officers developed a completely new programme which led to his unmasking. Investigators did a remarkable job in piecing together limited information to finally reveal that Armstrong was the person in these images.”
Lucy Dowdall, senior crown prosecutor in the CPS Cymru-Wales RASSO (Rape and Serious Sexual Offences) Unit, said: “The abuse that Armstrong subjected his victims to was horrific. Despite the passage of time and the steps he had taken to hide his identity, the CPS built a robust case against him resulting in guilty pleas.”
