A CONVICTED rapist with a list of sex offence convictions was caught with more than 100 images of naked children at his Darwen home.

William Rogers had not thought the photos were indecent – merely a thing of beauty, a court heard.

He claimed to have found them on a DVD provided with a naturist-type mag-azine that was widely available.

Rogers was convicted foll-owing trial at magistrates’ court and had been comm-itted for sentence to Preston Crown Court.

Rogers, 57, of Entwistle Street, was given three years supervision, with an order to go on a sex offenders’ treatment prog-ramme.

The court heard that he had 31 previous sex offence convictions on his record. In 1979 he had been given a four-year jail term at Preston Crown Court for rape. His other convictions included indecency with children and indecent assault.

He once received a term of over nine years in prison for indecent assaults.

Rogers had been released from prison just over a year before his latest offences in November last year.

His present offences were 15 counts of making indecent photographs or pseudo photographs of children.

David Macro, prosecuting, said two detectives went to Rogers’s home on the morning of November 26 with a search warrant.

A holdall was found in his bedroom.

Under the hard base of the bag, a large number of photographs were found.

Many of the photos were of adult porn, but there were also quite a number of indecent images of children. The 112 images were of the Level 1 category, the least serious group.

At the time, Rogers was a registered sex offender and being carefully monitored by the police.

Mark Cooper, defending, said Rogers had not disp-uted having the images.

The simple issue had been that he did not think they were indecent.

“His version is that the images were found on a DVD provided with a nat-urist-type magazine that is widely available.”

The defendant is already on the sex offenders register for life.

The judge made a fresh sexual offences prevention order.