A male nurse who fantasised about killing and eating a teenage girl has been convicted for sexual grooming. Dale Bolinger, 58, from south east England, bought an axe the day before he planned to meet his intended victim.
The BBC reports that jurors heard how Mr Bolinger chatted with the girl, who was under the age of 16, after meeting her on an online fetish site. In his conversations with her on the ‘Dark Fetish Network’, Bolinger described how he wanted to “murder” her and prepare her “for the table”.
They arranged for the girl to travel from Germany to meet him, but she never arrived.
Bolinger told police he had had been interested in the idea of cannibalism since childhood. He added: “I do not find children sexually attractive but I do find them interesting as a food source.”
Speaking for the prosecution, Martin Yale said that Bolinger’s internet chats, in which he spoke of beheading and eating women and girls, were discovered by the FBI. Agents tracked his email address – meatmarketman@rocketmail.com – to Kent, England and passed his information on to Kent police.
Mr Yale added that Bolinger had used a picture of supermodel Naomi Campbell on his profile, and in various chats claimed to have eaten a 39-year-old black woman and a five-year-old child.
His profile listed his interests as “cannibalism, mainly the hunting and preparation of young but sometimes not so young women”.
He told “Eva”, the girl he was due to meet: “The idea of us making love and then eating you is a VERY great turn on!
“I have been called a very generous lover and I would be very generous to you before I prepped you for the table.”
Bolinger event went as far as buying an axe from a hardware store the day before he was due to meet girl, telling her: “Got the axe, you ready to get that train?”
He was finally arrested at the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, where he worked as a nurse. Police also found digitally manipulated indecent images of children aged four to 16 on his computer. Titles for the images included “The BBQ”, “BBQ2”, “BBQ3” and “Dinner”.
One image showed a girl on a serving plate with an apple in her mouth.
Bolinger told the court, however, that his thoughts about cannibalism had only been fantasy and he would have been shocked if “Eva” actually arrived on the train. He also claimed that his graphic online chats were only to shock, and he never intended to actually kill anyone.
Speaking for the defence, Paul Jarvis said: “We say that when you look at all the evidence, it’s quite clear that Mr Bolinger is far more Walter Mitty than Hannibal Lecter.
“He is a fantasist and sometimes he goes too far and sometimes he stops, and sometimes – when the person encourages him – the fantasy continues.”
He was found guilty, however, after three hours of deliberation.
Judge Adele Williams has adjourned sentencing until 19 September after requesting a psychiatric and pre-sentence report on Bolinger to “assess the level of risk the defendant poses to the public”.
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