Leigh Heydon: Fitzroy man with pleads guilty to child porn offences

A Fitzroy man caught with hundreds of child abuse images won’t serve jail time despite refusing to give police access to a stash of vile material.

A Fitzroy man has walked free after pleading guilty to child abuse material charges.

A Fitzroy man who was busted hoarding sickening child abuse material and who refused to give up the password to a number of electronic devices has escaped jail.

Leigh Heydon, 40, pleaded guilty at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Monday, March 15, to knowingly posses child abuse material and refuse to provide the password and access codes, coping a two-year community corrections order with conviction.

Police raided his Fitzroy home and found the accused living alone at the property on January 22, 2020, and found a number of devices including mobile phones, laptops, hard disk drives, solid state drives and flash drives.

In a statement provided to the court, police claim when they asked Heydon to provide passwords to the devices he replied “no comment”.

Court documents revealed by Victoria Police state digital forensic analyst found child abuse material on four devices that were not password protected but that the remaining items, with more than 21TB in storage, were “password encrypted and inoperable,” and the contents would never be known.

From the four devices forensic analysts were able to access, including one named “Sandy (clean up first)”, they found 736 images and 18 videos of illegal child abuse content.

Some of the hard drives that police will never know the contents of were labelled ‘CAROLINE’, ‘SECURE DISPOSE X’, and ‘OLDER’.

Heydon will return to court in March 2023 for a bond hearing.