Why mark bridger

The hearing had been due at the Court of Appeal in London on 24 January. Bridger took April from outside her home in a sexually-motivated attack before murdering her and disposing of her body. Blood and fragments of bone consistent with a young human skull were found at his home. Child sex abuse images were found on his laptop, along with images of children from the area. Bridger had claimed he had run over April in his car and could not remember where he disposed of her body. When sentencing Bridger, Mr Justice Griffith Williams said: "There is no doubt in my mind that you are a paedophile, who has for some time harboured sexual and morbid fantasies about young girls.

But that was complete fantasy. Bridger had never joined the army. In fact, far from having a distinguished military career, the court was told that as a teenager Bridger had been in trouble with the police. Later, senior detectives pointed out he did not have the criminal past they would have expected from a predatory paedophile. He had pleaded guilty to offences including possession of a firearm, having an imitation firearm with intent to commit an offence and theft when he was about In the early s, he was also convicted of criminal damage, affray and driving with no insurance.

In , when he was 20, he became a firefighter in London. Within six months, he had quit due to "personal problems". He told the jury how it was around the time he had split up with his partner, soon after the birth of their son.

It was at this point that Bridger turned his attentions to Wales. He knew south Wales because his grandmother lived there. I lived on the beach for a couple of months," he told the court. He said he lived in places including Porthmadog, Blaenau Ffestiniog and Bala in Gwynedd, where he had a variety of jobs, including bar work, being a chef, a waiter, a car recovery mechanic and a forestry worker. After living in several locations, he finally settled in Machynlleth - a small town of some 2, people.

He had pleaded guilty to a string of offences including attempting to take a car, possession of a firearm, having an imitation firearm, theft and two counts of obtaining property by deception. But though he was regarded as a drinker with a short and often violent temper, particularly directed against women and on one occasion a fellow motorist in a road rage attack, he was never considered a risk to children or convicted of a sexual offence.

The college drop-out had drifted through a series of jobs, including an unsuccessful stint with the London Fire Brigade. After moving to Wales following a row with his family in Surrey, he worked as a life guard, a slaughter house worker and in forestry — an occupation which gave him specialist knowledge of the tracks and hills surrounding the market town.

On the day of the killing, as he sent angry text messages to an ex-girlfriend and tried to arrange dates with a number of other women who he hit on at random, he spent time viewing his collection of child pornography.

The disturbing cache included 65 criminal-standard abuse images. Carefully categorised into separate folders were pictures of Soham murder victims Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and British schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson who was raped and killed on a school trip to France in She had earlier refused a Facebook request to befriend the year-old on the advice of her mother.

Bridger meanwhile set his own Facebook settings to maximum and concealed his age. The files contained photographs from the social networking site including a number of April which were downloaded just eight days before her murder.

Mark Bridger probably sexually assaulted April Jones before brutally murdering and dismembering her body, disposing of her at various locations, police believe. The admission during a counselling session, which was not relied on by prosecutors during his trial, was made while Bridger was being held in HMP Strangeways following his arrest. Exact details have not been released but reporters who attended the hearing at Mold Crown Court listened to legal arguments in which the admission was discussed.

Detective Superintendent Andy John, the officer responsible for the case, admitted no-one will ever truly know what Bridger did to the vulnerable cerebral palsy sufferer in his Ceinws house and how he disposed of her body afterwards unless he tells the truth. But following the successful prosecution of year-old Bridger, DS John spoke freely about how his team cracked the case. Given the urgency of the situation DS John made the unprecedented decision to instigate the Child Rescue Alert — something which to his knowledge had never been done before.

But soon after having instigated the CRA the detective knew he had made the right move, with officers handling more than 1, calls and creating 4, messages within the first 24 hours. Within hours after April was abducted hundreds of locals took to the streets and the surrounding area to help with the search. And while their actions have been praised, their absence from their homes created an unwanted hurdle for police to overcome.

With the clock ticking and the knowledge that most child kidnap victims are killed within hours of their abduction weighing heavily on his mind, DS John quickly set about establishing who the suspect they were dealing with was. Eventually, six hours after he was identified as a suspect, Bridger was arrested on foot walking between Machynlleth and his village of Ceinws. But despite having him in custody, officers were still no closer to finding April as even though Bridger admitted to killing the youngster, he claimed he could not remember what he had done with her body.

As a result officers acted with haste without fear of contaminating anything which may potentially be used as evidence against Bridger. It was at that point that DS John took the decision to inform the family of all the evidence as it developed during the course of the investigation.

Two police family liaison officers were subsequently assigned to support them and to help them come to terms with any developments. And so it was that the focus of the investigation shifted to the forensic examinations. The were also repeatedly told of the library of indecent images of children Bridger had saved on his computer. And while no blood was found on any of the arsenal of blades Bridger kept at his rented three-bedroom home, it is because of these findings that DS John believes April may have been cut up before being dumped in the surrounding countryside.

Attempting to explain the bone fragment findings, DS John suggested they may have found their way into the fire during the clean-up. April Jones murder: How Mark Bridger modelled himself on world's most notorious killers. Detectives behind conviction of April Jones' killer detail his fascination with figures including Ian Huntley and Ted Bundy. Also stored were pictures of Caroline Dickinson, a British year-old who was murdered in France in July ; Jessica Lunsford, a nine-year-old murdered in Florida, the United States, in ; and Esra Akyuz, a six-year-old Turkish girl who was murdered in While jurors heard how Bridger performed searches on American serial killer Ted Bundy — who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of women during the s — and the murder of Jamie Bulger.

It is only now that the trial has concluded that we can also report how jurors were so revolted at the thought of Bridger getting gratification at seeing these images in court, that they asked the judge to stop him viewing them.

And so it was that the judge banned the paedophile from looking at the computer evidence, ordering the court's computer screens to be turned off or moved out of his line of vision.

What can also be reported for the first time, and what the jury were not told during the course of the trial, is that inside Bridger's VCR machine at the time of his arrest was a recording of a violent rape scene from a film. Not only was the video positioned in the middle of the scene from cult-film The Last House on the Left, but Bridger had recorded the clip twice over. With this in mind, the detective said he believed Bridger was trying to build himself a reputation and that he even enjoyed being known for his actions.

Throughout his trial Bridger repeatedly broke down in tears and while giving evidence his voice regularly faltered.

But this was all part of the plan to convince the jury of his innocence — a cold and calculated plan which according to DS John came easy to Bridger. And it is when he lost this control that DS John feels Bridger was prompted to carry out the horrific acts he did on October 1. Jurors were told during the trial how Bridger had recently broken up with his girlfriend and how he had money worries.

Mark Bridger: The true picture of the violence-obsessed fantasist who murdered April Jones. Father-of-six spun a 'web of lies' about a glorious military career to hide a secret life characterised by an obsession with rape and murder. Child murderer Mark Bridger is an alcoholic fantasist who had an obsession with child pornography, rape and murder. The year-old, who was today found guilty of the sexually motivated abduction and murder of schoolgirl April Jones, was to many people in Machynlleth a charming, charasmatic and courteous man.

But behind closed doors the father-of-six was a paedophile who built up his own personal library of indecent images of youngsters which he would pore over for hours at a time. Using the internet he researched historic child murder cases such as that of Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman and Caroline Dickinson - the victims of notorious Soham murderer Ian Huntley and the British schoolgirl murdered in France - while he also downloaded cartoon animations of violent child rapes in addition to pictures of dead children.

Throughout his trial the prosecution accused him of playing a "cruel game" by lying about the fact he could not remember what he had done with April. Yet lying was nothing unusual for Bridger - a man whose private life was a far cry from the act he had spent decades carefully honing and presenting to the people of Machynlleth.

A well known face in the town, he was seen as a harmless odd-jobs man who once served in the armed forces who could often be found having a drink in one of the local pubs. He was a man who provoked sympathy for the apparent suicide of his mother who he said took her own life after his father died of a heart attack.

But the truth is, not only are his parents alive, but he had never served in the SAS or any other arm of the forces and it was ultimately through his trial that his capacity to live a "lie and a fantasy" was exposed.

Jurors saw through his attempts to cover up what he did to April as they also did with his attempts at justifying his hoard of pornographic images of children. The former slaughterman tried to explain away his vile library by saying he wanted to learn how his daughter would develop and that he had written to pornography companies abroad to complain about the images he kept as evidence against them. Despite his carefully hidden depravities and fondness for alcohol, Bridger did not lack social skills and was known to have had a number of a relationships with local women.

Indeed he was in a relationship right up until the day before he brutally murdered cerebal palsy sufferer April - only for his girlfriend Vicky Fenner to break up with him via text.

Some in the local community saw Bridger as a bit of a womaniser but it emerged during his trial others thought his intentions more sinister on the basis that he had "a history of relationships with young mothers".

His base need for sexual gratification was more than apparent following the end of his relationship with Ms Fenner. Instead of grieving for the loss of his companion he scoured social netwrok sites contacting several women pleading for "no strings" fun.

Perhaps the most disturbing secret Bridger kept hidden though was his attraction to local girls. In addition to the catalogue of indecent images found on his computer was a store of Facebook-style folders of youngsters from the Machynlleth area.