Royal police officer created teenage girl alter ego ‘to exchange explicit chat with other men online’

A royal protection officer who posed online as a 17-year-old girl “for kicks” is facing the threat of a prison sentence after admitting hoarding more than 1,000 indecent pictures. Police Constable Adam Cox, 31, was working in the Metropolitan Police Service’s (MPS) Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection when he created an alter ego called Emily Whitehouse to exchange explicit chat with other men online. On being asked to send them sexually revealing photographs, PC Cox found images online of a Canadian woman who committed suicide at the age of 21 and passed them off as `Emily`. When his home was searched by officers in June last year, his computers were seized and found to contain the chat logs and internet searches for “pre-teens”. He told investigators: “I`m not hoarding images. I have never meant to hurt anyone. I`m not a collector. I`ve not got a secret stash.” But a total of 1,691 indecent and extreme images, with one featuring an infant and others showing children as young as seven, were retrieved. PC Cox, from Windsor, Berkshire, pleaded guilty to four counts of possession of indecent images – 645 of the most serious category A pictures, 201 category B, 449 category C, and 396 extreme pornographic images of bestiality. He denied encouraging three men to attempt to get indecent images from `Emily` and the charges were ordered to lie on file. Prosecutor Charles Falk said: “This may very well be an abuse of trust because he is a police officer. “His role is security for embassies, parliament and the royal family.” Mitigating, Nick Yeo said PC Cox had expressed “intense remorse” and faced losing his job as a result of the case. He said: “He is a man who finds it extremely difficult to articulate his motivation and one can quite understand that because the context is extremely unusual conduct, one might think.” The defendant appeared at the Old Bailey alongside Harry Gibbs, 32, of Stevenage, Hertfordshire, Andrew Monk, 39, of Kettering, Northamptonshire, and Ajai Shridhar, 46, of Ealing, west London. The three men, who had engaged in online chat with `Emily`, had admitted attempting to possess indecent images of children. Over two months in the spring of 2016, Monk pestered `Emily` for pictures, particularly ones of her wearing high-heeled shoes, and posed sexually explicit questions. Gibbs and Monk were handed 12-month community orders. PC Cox, suspended from duty since August 2, 2016 following his arrest by Hertfordshire Constabulary, has been made subject to a sexual harm prevention order. He will be sentenced with Shridhar on Friday (December 22). Judge Mark Dennis QC said PC Cox had pretended to be a teenage girl “for kicks”, adding it was “troubling” that he had yet to come to terms with what it was all about. The MPS’s Directorate of Professional Standards will conduct a misconduct review once criminal proceedings are complete.