Infamous criminals Australia: Australia’s worst childcare paedophile Ashley Paul Griffith

Warning: This story contains details of child sexual abuse.

Experts fear the exact number of victims abused by Australia’s most notorious paedophile will never be known and say he should never be released from jail.

It has been a year since Ashley Paul Griffith was sentenced to life in prison over the worst case of abuse in childcare centres this country has ever seen.

This week The Nightly is taking a fresh look inside the crimes and minds of Australia’s most recent high-profile criminals.

These are the monsters who have been jailed in the last decade for offending so heinous it horrified the nation and made headlines around the world.

Griffith, who raped and exploited scores of children in Brisbane and Italy over two decades, is among this new breed of infamous inmates.

The former childcare worker not only sexually abused vulnerable children in his care but filmed his sickening depravity and shared it online to “self-aggrandise” and use it as currency in dark web forums.

Criminology professor Michael Salter, from the University of New South Wales, says sharing the abuse was Griffith’s mistake and the only reason his two-decade reign of terror came to a screeching halt.

“Griffith slipped up,” he said.

“He was only detected because he accidentally left the label of a blanket visible in some of the material that he created.

“That was the clue that allowed police to be able to trace the blanket back to Queensland, back to that daycare centre, and ultimately to Griffith.”

In 2014, Queensland Police specialist squad Task Force Argos discovered images and videos online of two girls being abused, which had been uploaded by username “Zimble”.

Authorities spent the next eight years painstakingly examining the material for clues that would identify the girls and their perpetrator.

In 2022, victim identification specialists finally unmasked “Zimble” after tracing a bedsheet in the images back to a Brisbane childcare centre.

Police arrested Griffith on the Gold Coast, where horrifyingly, he was still working in childcare.

It was only then that his offending abruptly stopped and the unimaginable scale of his crimes began to emerge.

After his arrest police discovered a trove of material documenting the rape and sexual abuse of young girls, mostly aged between three and five.

The prolific offender had catalogued thousands of images and videos of his perverted exploitation.

Last November Griffith was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to 309 sexual offences against 73 victims.

The 46-year-old’s known crimes were at childcare centres in Brisbane and Italy between 2003 and 2022.

Professor Salter, also the Director of Childlight UNSW, says Griffith was “able to set up a recording device to abuse children for, in some cases, 20 to 30 minutes”.

“Offenders who target infants and babies are highly motivated, highly premeditated, very manipulative and often they are involved with larger networks of offenders, particularly online,” he said.

Professor Salter, an expert in child sexual exploitation and gendered violence, has no doubt Griffith would have abused other children.

“We would be naive to assume that the criminal justice record of offending behaviour is ever the totality of the offender’s behaviour,” he said.

“They do not confess to crimes for which there is no evidence.”

Forensic psychologist Lars Madsen, who has more than 20 years’ experience in the assessment and treatment of sexual and violent offending, agrees that the number of children Griffith abused off-camera will never be known.

“And he would forget as well,” he said.

Before his arrest, complaints against Griffith about suspected child sexual abuse were made to his employers, the Early Childhood Regulatory Authority and QPS.

The complaints were not progressed, prosecuted or acted on.

Dr Madsen, director of Forensic + Clinical Psychology Centre in Brisbane, said these close-calls did not deter Griffith because he believed he would never get caught.

“Offending has been a function of his life, a core aspect of his identity, probably since he was a child,” he said.

“He’s an out-and-out-straight paedophile. He has no interest in adult relationships.

“I would suspect he was an awkward, isolated, unattractive and unimpressive kind of teenager with this very powerful sexual interest.”

Dr Madsen said this “massive, compulsive sexual interest” is what would have attracted Griffith to a career in childcare.

“This interest would have been there long before he even rolled up to his first day at university,” he said.

“He then made decisions about trying to pursue opportunities and context where he could actually exploit this interest.”

Dr Madsen said Griffith seemed “fixated, focused and disciplined” in his approach.

He will always be considered an extremely high-risk offender because of that really entrenched, reinforced, exclusive deviancy.

“How does someone offend sexually in a childcare centre without getting caught? You have to be bloody well disciplined, know the system very well and be very motivated,” he said.

“The obsessiveness around recording things and detailing things, speaks to his personality.

“Clearly, he’s an extremely obsessive person so there’d be a lot of planning, thinking, organising and co-ordinating.”

Griffith was also a master manipulator.

“He would have been very skilled at being able to manipulate people, read people and groom people, so he would groom the parents and his work colleagues as well,” Dr Madsen said.

“He would have had very good skills at being able to appear believable, presentable, reliable and trustworthy.

“He would know all the levers to pull and the right things to say to keep people at arm’s length from him.”

Dr Madsen said Griffith – who was “extraordinarily callous” and cowardly – was determined to offend regardless of any obstacles.

“This is a man that is actively problem-solving and thinking through how to get past things,” he said.

“He would have been planning, looking for loopholes, looking for ways to get around it and doing that meticulously.

“He’s extremely determined, focused and very good at hiding it.”

A psychiatrist told the court Griffith had a “paedophilic disorder” and that he lacked empathy towards his victims.

The psychiatric report said Griffith “never tried to stop the offending because he did not have the courage to do so”.

Brisbane District Court Judge Paul Smith said Griffith was “depraved and has a high risk of reoffending”.

Griffith, who was described by Brisbane District Court Judge Paul Smith as depraved with “a high risk of reoffending” — will be 71 by the time he is eligible to apply for parole from the high-security Wolston prison in 2049.

“He will always be considered an extremely high-risk offender because of that really entrenched, reinforced, exclusive deviancy,” Dr Madsen said.

“Even if he comes into therapy and says, ‘I’m feeling really bad about what I did’, you would have to think, ‘well, do you really? I’m not so sure that you do. I think that you feel really bad that you got caught’.”

Griffith is appealing his sentence but no date for a court hearing has been set.

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