‘I had cannibal fantasies since I was six’

A nurse who allegedly arranged to meet a 14-year-old girl he planned to behead with an axe and eat started having fantasies about cannibalism at the age of six, a court has heard.

Dale Bolinger, 57, told police when he was first arrested in February last year for attempting to sexually groom a girl under the age of 16 that he had had fantasies about staff at a kindergarten taking some of the girls to the kitchen to eat them, prosecutor Martin Yale told Canterbury Crown Court.

Reading Bolinger’s interview to the court, Mr Yale continued: “By the time I got to 14, I turned into the villain of the piece and I wondered what it would be like to eat a girl.”