Deep in the putrid bowels of a dark web society of pedophiles, where monsters relish in each other’s depravity, a user named Zimble posted a “how to” guide on molesting little girls.

“Without knowing specifics about the child’s personality, is she shy or super affectionate?” he wrote.

“My first priority would be to try to get her sitting on my lap. This can be very easy with some children.”

He went on to describe in detail the incremental nature of his techniques, giving advice to other predators on what had worked in his “experiences”.

Distract with an iPad. Just go slowly and don’t make it obvious. If she pushes you away, don’t try again.

“If she is younger, you can probably get away with a lot more,” he wrote, nauseatingly.

It was 2014 and “Zimble”, one of the 45,000 members of a global online pedophile network called The Love Zone (or TLZ), had uploaded a catalogue of his perverse activities.

Six little girls had been filmed and photographed by Zimble as he molested them. He uploaded ten videos and 46 photographs of his crimes against them and wrote to the site’s VIP area, asking to be considered for approval. Impressed, they gave it to him.

Zimble didn’t know it, but his days rejoicing among his own kind were numbered.

Lurking inside TLZ were investigators from the Queensland Police Service. They had infiltrated the site and from within, went straight to the top.

The CEO of this cesspit was a predator named Skee. On June 10, 2014, they tracked him down to a suburban home in Adelaide.

His name was Shannon McCoole – a 32-year-old child and youth worker who’d been abusing the foster children he’d been paid to protect.

His arrest would spark a Royal Commission, but not before police walked into his house, opened his laptop and took over his account.

They posed as him for months as they collected information and data, doing their best to arm themselves with what they’d need to track down predators and rescue their victims.

TLZ was shut down that year and its catalogue of filth would be added to the millions of images that make up Interpol’s International Child Sexual Exploitation database.

When news of McCoole’s arrest and the take-down of TLZ became public, Zimble, like many of his cockroach-like friends, panicked.

He cleared his hard drive and left his job in Pisa, Italy, where he’d been abusing more children, and fled to his home country: Australia.

For years, Zimble and the little girls he’d filmed remained unidentified. But the images had given up enough clues to indicate they were in Australia. Clothing worn by the children was sold by major Australian retail chains.

Chillingly, other items in the room suggested they were being molested within the walls of a childcare centre.

They’d seen the monster just once – a flash of side profile, blurred, not enough to help them.

Then, in August 2022, an investigator from the Australian Federal Police victim identification team watching one of the videos noticed something. A brand name on a blanket.

A little digging determined it was a brand of blanket sometimes used in childcare centres. A little more digging gave them the names of those childcare centres who had purchased them.

And more digging still would lead them to childcare worker Ashley Paul Griffith.

At 11pm on August 20, 2022, they banged on the door of a home on the Gold Coast and got the country’s most prolific child sex offender out of bed.

Griffith had been staying the night at his mother’s house. The next day they’d raid his home and the home of another family member. They’d find phones, hard drives, a laptop and SD cards.

They’d trace his offending to 11 childcare centres in Queensland, one in Italy and another in New South Wales.

He is yet to face prosecution in NSW.

At his mother’s house, Griffith denied everything. Later, when police reached into the depths of his electronic catalogue of depravity, he became more compliant.

AFP investigators would find 571 videos and 18,257 images he’d downloaded from the dark web. They showed children as young as two being raped by adults.

His own catalogue was there too. For 20 years he’d abused, undressed, touched and raped 65 children in Queensland and four more in Italy.

He filmed and photographed them as he did it, distracting them with iPads, touching them while they slept and gaining their trust and affection so they’d not protest.

At one centre he’d set up one camera on a tripod and used his phone to film from a second angle as he undressed, touched and raped them.

His victims were aged between two and seven, although investigators believe one child may have been as young as one when he abused her. The majority of the girls were aged between three and five.

He’d been meticulous, keeping students’ records and class photographs in folders, while cataloguing his abuse by the name of the centre he’d worked at, the first name of the child and the type of abuse he’d inflicted on them.

Confronted with the noose he’d tied, Griffith folded. Over five months, he would give 18 hours of police interviews. He’d spend a lot of that time minimising his offending but gradually worked with investigators who’d spend months working to identify the dozens of little girls whose lives he’d change forever.

When they were ready, officers from the AFP’s Joint Anti Child Exploitation Taskforce set out to do the unimaginable. Armed with redacted stills of little girls, they visited the parents and asked them to identify their daughters.

In some cases, Griffith’s former students, now young adults, were told what had been done to them.

On Friday, Griffith learned his fate. For 307 offences of indecently treating children in his care, rape, maintaining a sexual relationship with a child, making child exploitation material and more.

He did not react as he learned of his life sentence and its 27 year non-parole period.

Others did.

“Rot in hell you dirty c …” one woman screamed.

And Griffith was led away to the hell in which he’ll rot.