A pervert babysitter who sexually abused 13 children and babies as young a one-month-old has been jailed for nearly 15 years.
Accused Marcus R., 45, was found guilty of 84 counts of child sex abuse in the trial at the Cologne District Court in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany, on 28th February.
The trial heard how married Marcus R. posed as a blameless family man to hide his grim secret life.
Judge Christoph Kaufmann told him: “Behind a bourgeois facade there was a dark side.”
Police in Berlin began investigating him after he was spotted during a separate investigation into another paedophile in August 2021.
Marcus R. had chatted online with the child abuser on the darknet.
The two were said to have teamed up to abuse children together at least three times.
Dubbed the ‘Monster of Wermelskirchen’, IT specialist Marcus R. had set up a sinister encrypted online network for child molesters to keep tabs on their victims and on other abusers.
The sick network listed at least 73 other paedophiles and their vile preferences, and kept records on exactly which offender had access to which victim.
To broaden his network of child victims, Marcus R. introduced himself to single parents by offering his services as a babysitter on parenting websites.
He then sedated the children and abused them until they cried out in pain.
Meanwhile, he was videoing the abuse so he could share it with other perverts on his network.
One of his victims – the court heard – was just four weeks old and others were disabled.
He was in the middle of a live video conference when police stormed his home in December 2021.
He was arrested and police seized his hard drive, which contained 1.5 million videos and 3.5 million images of child rape and abuse.
Marcus R. later admitted to all of the crimes through his lawyer, Christian Lange.
He even stated that he had sexually abused many more children than he had been charged with.
Marcus R. was jailed for 14 years and six months and was also ordered to pay damages of between EUR 5,000 (GBP 4,440) and EUR 100,000 (GBP 88,800) to the victims.
Co-prosecutor Sandra Buhr said: “You can’t imagine it, you leave the child in supposedly good hands, have a nice evening and then years later you find out that the child was abused.”
The judges reportedly evaluated more 26 hours of video material stored in Marcus R.’s personal computer.
After the verdict, NRW Minister of the Interior Herbert Reul, 70, said: “Who digs deeper, finds more and sometimes also discovers new, undreamt-of abysses.
“I am relieved that this paedo criminal, tormentor of so many innocent children, is now behind bars for many years.
“Every victim who is freed, every perpetrator who is punished, gives us additional motivation to track down child molesters and to invest in human resources and technology for this important work.”
