When police caught up with the 72-year-old he was deleting the app from his phone
File photo of Bristol Crown Court(Image: BPM MEDIA)
A man has been given a suspended prison sentence after he admitted sending a picture of a naked child to someone else on the social messaging app Kik – only to discover the person he was sending it to was an undercover police officer.
The court heard that when police knocked on Cyril Taylor’s door they found him in the back garden deleting the app from his phone before police could reach him.
The 72-year-old was given a nine-month prison sentence for two offences he admitted at previous hearings, but the judge in the case said there was a ‘realistic prospect of rehabilitation’ after hearing Taylor was upping his medication and was volunteering in the community’, so he suspended the prison term for 18 months and gave him community service instead.
Taylor, from Lawrence Weston, Bristol, had previously been convicted of possessing indecent images of children and distributing them back in 2017, and had spent a year in prison in the past.
The court heard that in early 2023 he was made the subject of a ten-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO), which forbids him from having any social media apps on his phone that include a direct messaging function – he can only communicate by basic standard text messages.
But in June 2023, he downloaded the messaging and group chat app Kik, adopted the username ‘Cider68’, and within a couple of weeks, he was chatting to another user who – unbeknown to Taylor – was an undercover police officer with the codename ‘M’.
“During their conversation, he told them he liked looking at naked pictures of women and young girls, he brought ages up and the undercover officer said ‘we’re into different things’,” Francesca Chaplin, prosecuting, told Bristol Crown Court.
“On June 23, he then sent the operative ‘M’ an image of a child sitting naked on a garden chair. The child was aged around nine or ten-years-old. This was later determined to be an image in Category C level of severity of indecent images of children,” Ms Chaplin added.
“They even had some conversations about ‘being set up’, with M telling Taylor he was worried about being in trouble, and Taylor replied that he would be the one in trouble because he’d sent the image,” Ms Chaplin said.
Taylor pleaded guilty to a second offence – breaching the SHPO order by downloading Kik in the first place – which was deemed to be the more serious offence by the court.
Kik phone app
The court heard that in May 2023, after Taylor was made the subject of the order, a police officer installed onto his phone an ‘e-safe’ facility which alerted police if Taylor had downloaded any messaging apps.
A police officer eventually received an email from e-safe to say Taylor had used a VPN to download the messaging app Kik, and went round to his home in Mancroft Avenue, Lawrence Weston. The court heard officers found Taylor in his back garden and he appeared to be on his phone, using it before he gave it to police.
Officers couldn’t find the Kik app on his phone, and he quickly admitted that he had deleted it. Further searches of his phone revealed that he had installed it and used it. “The prosecution would say this is a deliberate breach rather than an unintentional breach, so is more serious,” said Ms Chaplin.
The court heard in between being caught in June 2023 and finally being sentenced in March 2026, Taylor committed and was convicted of a similar breach – in April 2024 he used Facebook messenger, a breach for which he was sentenced in July last year. In all, the court was told Taylor had two convictions for a total of seven offences.
The court heard that Taylor had been volunteering at a bowls club and he told the judge that he’d been to see his GP and upped his medication for PTSD and depression, as a way of helping him avoid offending again.
Defending, Alec Small welcomed the judge’s reassurance that he was minded to impose a suspended sentence. Mr Small questioned the severity of the terms of the SHPO, which he said ‘effectively cuts him off from using almost all of the internet’.
Kik phone app
“Almost everything has a messaging function now. If he’s got Facebook and someone sends him a message, is that breaking the order?” asked Mr Small.
“I bet his bowling club has a WhatsApp group,” said the judge, Recorder David Chidgey. “Which he is banned from joining,” replied Mr Small.
The judge said it would be for Taylor’s legal team to appeal against the wording of the SHPO at a different hearing, and then addressed the 72-year-old directly.
He said that the author of the pre-sentence report about him carried out by the probation service was concerned that Taylor thought the offences he had committed ‘were not a big deal’, and the judge impressed upon him the seriousness of what he had done. “If you continue to go to these sorts of chat rooms, next time you’ll probably be going to prison again,” Recorder Chidgey said.
“I applaud the progress that you tell me you’ve made, volunteering at a bowling club – it’s good that you’ve got involved in the community’,” he said.
Recorder Chidgey handed down a sentence of seven months for breaching the SHPO and another two months consecutively for distributing the indecent image, making a total of nine months in prison, which will be suspended for 18 months.
He also made an order that Taylor undertakes 100 hours unpaid community service, and takes 26 sessions of programmed rehabilitation.
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