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A police officer who blackmailed a suspect she had arrested in an indecent images case to fund her gambling addiction has been jailed for more than three years.
PC Marie Thompson was sentenced to 40 months in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty in September to blackmail and perverting the course of justice.
Leeds crown court heard that she used a fake email address to contact a man being investigated for an alleged sexual offence, and posed as a paedophile hunter who demanded a £3,500 payment to “ensure that information remains between you and us”.
Thompson, 29, had been in charge of a South Yorkshire police investigation into the man she had arrested in October 2022 on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.
During pre-sentencing mitigation, it was revealed that Thompson’s motives were driven by her need for money to cover “considerable debts” that she had accrued due to a “severe gambling disorder”.
The court heard that shortly after the man was interviewed and released under investigation, he received an email from an anonymised address that read: “Information has been passed to us that you have been arrested for media involving children. As an organisation which works to protect children from people such as yourself we therefore ask you to make a donation to us.”
The email, which was signed “Paedophile Hunters”, provided the number and sort code for a bank account and demanded that the man pay the money into it in order to not publicise the allegations against him.
The man’s partner later received a text message that said he had to reply to the initial email before the end of the day. The couple decided against paying the money and contacted the police.
Thompson told the man she would investigate the matter but instead wrote in her crime report that he did not want to pursue a criminal complaint. She also told “a number of lies” in entries into her notebook, which included falsifying the number used to text the man’s partner in order to hide the fact that it was her own.
After this, Thompson sent the man another email with the subject line “I’m so sorry”, which read: “I came to drop something off for my mum and overheard you talking. I never told a soul and never intended to.” The court heard that this was sent as “a further attempt by Thompson to cover her tracks”. She then told the man that his blackmailer couldn’t be traced.
When Thompson left her team in 2023, her caseload was transferred to another officer, who, upon being told by the man about the original blackmail plot, found that Thompson had not properly investigated it. When the officer checked the number that the man’s partner had received the threats from, he discovered that it matched the one Thompson had used on her police vetting form. She was subsequently arrested and charged.
