Cannibal fetish trial: Dale Bolinger guilty of trying to meet girl 'to behead and eat her' after online grooming

The 58-year-old NHS nurse had bought an axe the day before planning to meet 14-year-old girl

Dale Bolinger arranged to meet the girl via a fetish website (PA)

A male NHS nurse with a sexual fetish for cannibalism has been found guilty of grooming a 14-year-old girl with a view to meeting her, murdering her and ultimately eating her.

The jury at Canterbury Crown Court heard how 58-year-old Dale Bolinger had used a chatroom on a fetish website to contact the teenager, said to be a Mexican girl called "Eva" living in Germany.

He described how it would be a "great turn on" to behead and eat her, and the day before she was due to fly to the UK bought an axe from a DIY store.

Bolinger, a father of three from Kent, worked as a registered nurse at the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.

But in a series of messages uncovered by FBI agents in New York he told "Eva": "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 told police that he believed "Eva" - who has never been identified - was probably a man in his 30s "surrounded by pizza boxes" and denied he would ever actually decapitate someone in real life.

But prosecutor Martin Yale told the trial that it was clear Bolinger did believe "Eva" to be a 14-year-old girl, that he bragged about the proposed meeting in Kent to other chat users on the site Dark Fetish Network and that he messaged her the day before their meeting to say: "Got the axe, you ready to get that train?"

After Bolinger was arrested at the hospital where he worked, police found digitally-manipulated indecent images of children aged four to 16 stashed in his home.

Before the trial, he pleaded guilty to one count of making indecent pseudo photographs of children and seven counts of publishing an obscene article.

And in what prosecutors said was evidence he was willing to act on his fetishist fantasies in reality, Bolinger also admitted a charge of administering a poison or noxious substance after he put a cloth soaked in dry cleaning fluid over a female friend's mouth in July 2010.

After a four-day trial, Bolinger was found guilty of attempting to meet a girl under the age of 16 following sexual grooming.

Judge Adele Williams adjourned sentencing to September 19 after asking for a psychiatric and a pre-sentence report to be prepared to "assess the level of risk the defendant poses to the public".