Former Edinburgh school worker caught for second time with horror child abuse haul despite name change

Darren Scordecchia can be unmasked again despite attempting to hide his past by recently changing his name to Darren Scott.

Scott, 42, was employed as a technical support analyst at the capital’s fee-paying Mary Erskine School and Stewart Melville College when he was found with hundreds of sick images in 2017. He stored the material on a computer at his home and used file names including ‘virgin angels’, ‘good daughter - anal with dad’ and ‘pre-teen Lolita’ to classify the images.

Scott also owned child rape movies with titles including ‘Emma - 8-yr-old model’, ‘Daphne - 9-yrs-old’ and ‘pre-teen’.

Following his arrest he was immediately suspended then sacked by bosses at Mary Erskine School and Stewart Melville College where non-boarding pupils pay up to £11,000 per year to attend.

Darren Scordecchia can be unmasked again despite attempting to hide his past by recently changing his name to Darren Scott. | Alexander Lawrie

A horrified school spokesperson confirmed he was “employed as an ICT technician at ESMS from 2004 until 2017” and said they “were appalled to learn of his behaviour, which we find abhorrent”.

He escaped a jail term on that occasion and was sentenced to supervision, unpaid work and placed on the sex offenders register for 12 months.

Following his conviction the beast then changed his name from Scordecchia to Scott in a desperate attempt to gain anonymity. But he offended again when he was caught in possession of child abuse pictures for a second time when police officers raided his home at the city’s Dalry area on September 5 last year.

On this occasion it was discovered Scott had downloaded then deleted thousands of sadistic pictures and videos depicting children being sexually abused by adults over a six month period.

Devices seized from the flat held a total of 15,179 images showing male and female children aged between 12 months and 15-years-old. He was remanded in custody in September last year and pleaded guilty to the offence in April this year at Edinburgh Sheriff Court after the police cyber crime report had been produced.

Scott appeared back in the dock for sentencing on Thursday where Sheriff Charles Walls acknowledged he had already served the equivalent of a 20 month jail sentence while on remand.

Sheriff Walls said: “You must be under no illusion the children in these images are victims of your offending and they are unquestionably images at the upper end of Category A. The report suggests that you sought the material for shock value rather than sexual interest in children but that is self-reported and in my view does not detract from the seriousness of the offence.”

The sheriff added the aggravating factors included his previous offence, “a clear escalation” of his behaviour and the “the vulnerability” and “obvious pain and distress” of the child victims.

Scott, formerly known as Scordecchia, was sentenced to an alternative to custody and will be supervised by the social work team and was placed on the sex offenders register for three years.

The sheriff also imposed a conduct requirement with conditions including Scott being banned from having any contact with children under 17, having to declare all new relationships and any new employment.

Scott pleaded guilty possession indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children at his home address at Moat Drive in Edinburgh between March 23 and September 5, 2024.