A soldier was caught swapping explicit messages online with 13 and 14-year-old ‘girls’.

The four ‘girls’ that Simon Launchbury thought he was talking to on website Chat Step and WhatsApp were, in fact, adults working for ‘paedophile hunter’ groups.

Oxford Crown Court heard Launchbury, 33, was confronted by one of the vigilante gangs while he was on the army camp.

Days earlier he’d been phoned by another ‘hunter’, confessed what he’d done and said he was ‘sick to his stomach’. The former soldier, who resigned from the army after his sick offending came to light, later messaged the ‘girls’ and said what he’d been doing was ‘immoral and wrong’.

Sentencing Launchbury to 12 months’ imprisonment suspended for two years, Judge Michael Gledhill QC said: “You have lost your career, you’ve lost your reputation both professionally and personally, your wife has left and taken her son with her, you’ve had this hanging over your head for two years.

“I accept your remorse is genuine, I accept you had or still have a problem and you want to do something about it.”

The judge described Launchbury’s interest in girls aged 13 and 14 ‘perverted and extremely unhealthy’, adding of his claims to the police officers who interviewed him in 2019 that he didn’t believe the girls were underage and he’d been trying to provoke a reaction: "It was frankly pathetic; nobody was going to believe what you were saying.”

Prosecutor Matthew Kirk said the soldier’s contact with the ‘girls’ began on website Chat Hour before moving to WhatsApp.

The messages, sent between May and June 2019, included conversations about school, family and sex. He explained various terms, including ‘morning glory’, and suggested they meet in hotel rooms so he could give them massages.

Mitigating, Kellie Enever said her client was genuinely remorseful for what he’d done. His wife and child had moved away and, although he had lost his job with the army, he now had other employment.

The offending was described as out of character and had come as a surprise to those who knew him. She added: “This is a man who is determined to make good a very, very, very bad situation that he finds himself in.”

Judge Gledhill questioned why there had been such a delay in the case reaching court, as Launchbury had admitted sending the messages in 2019.

Launchbury, of Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to four counts of attempted sexual communication with a child. He must register as a sex offender for a decade and was made subject to a 10-year sexual harm prevention order designed to limit his access to the internet.

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