A married Co Down couple who photographed themselves naked abusing a toddler they'd raped have been told they face "significant sentences".
Gary and Heather Talbot were told by Judge Peirs Grant that their case involved very serious offences in which they had betrayed the trust of a very young child and that it was only realistic for them to expect to be given significant jail terms when sentenced next month.
In May last year, the paedophiles from Kinghill Avenue in the seaside town of Newcastle, pleaded guilty to a series of sex offences, committed between 2001 and 2003 against the child then aged, 18 months to when she was three years and three months.
The 60-year-old postman and bus driver, admitted a total of 16 charges including two rapes, gross indecency, indecent assault, and taking and distributing indecent images of the child, and a separate charge of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old teen sometime between July 2012 and July 2014.
His 59-year-old wife Heather admitted ten charges, including aiding and abetting her husband to rape the little girl, indecently assaulting her, committing acts of gross indecency, in addition to three charges of taking indecent images of the youngster.
Both sat in the dock just yards from their now grown-up victim, sitting in the public gallery supported by family and friends. At one stage Gary Talbot, who listened to the details of his crimes with eyes closed shut, appeared to shake his head from side to side in apparent denial, while his wife kept looking to the side, her eyes cast down.
Lawyers for the pair told Downpatrick Crown Court, sitting in Belfast, that little could be said in their mitigation, save their guilty pleas.
Lawyers also revealed that while Gary Talbot had an enhanced status in prison where he was leading a model existence as a prisoner, his wife in contrast was finding custody hard, self-isolating and living under threat and constant fear.
Earlier, prosecution QC David McDowell outlined in graphic detail the couples' perverted abuse of the child and of internet chats and boasts to other paedophiles, recovered on a variety of computer equipment seized from their home in October 2017.
He also revealed an external hard-drive was recovered from a locked bedroom cupboard, the key of which was secreted within the pages of the novel 'Lolita', on a bedside table.
Counsel explained a total of 47 indecent images, apparently recording three separate occasions of abuse, including rape, were taken of the toddler, which also showed the couple naked on some.
The court also heard the couple bought clothes for the child to be photographed in a sexually suggestive manner.
Defence QC Greg Berry for Gary Talbot said given the seriousness of the matters detailed to the court there was little that can be said in mitigation, save for the guilty pleas, for which he was entitled to credit. His admissions, he said allowed for the identification of his victim.
This he did, said Mr Berry out of a sense of shame and remorse, and to spur their victim having to give evidence.
Eugene Grant QC, when questioned if Mrs Talbot was contesting her guilty pleas, said she accepted he role, but as a "reluctant participant" in what had happened. She met her husband, he added, when aged 16, marrying him at 19 and that it had been a happy marriage.
However, it should be emphasised that what had occurred had been the fantasy of her husband, not her's and that she was involved in just three of the incidents.
Mr Grant said Heather Talbot had expressed her remorse for what happened, and was "disgusted" with herself that it ever happened, and had "blotted it out" by placing it at the "back of her brain."
She too, he added, should be given credit for her early pleas of guilt, which had spared the victim the trauma of giving evidence, and had saved the courts the expense in what was a "very upsetting case".