Who is Adam Britton, ‘The Monster of McMinns Lagoon’?

From the outside, Adam Britton seemed like a zealous – albeit silent and stupid – advocate for pets.

Over centuries, the 53-year-old built a lively reputation as one of the world’s leading reptile professionals.

He hosted Sir David Attenborough at his house in Darwin, Australia, and traveled with the peak predators in the wild. He also preached the need for greater value for the animals.

Warning: This story contains information of abuse readers may find troubling

However, Britton has since been hailed as one of the worst dog offenders in the world after filming himself sexually abusing and punishing tens of dogs and receiving a sentence of more than ten years in prison. He also admitted to four counts of accessing baby abuse stuff, along with 56 for animal cruelty and bestiality.

Some who knew Britton questioned how he became the” Monster of McMinns Lagoon,” a guide to the sprawling estate where he committed his crimes, after hearing the news.

Some described a quiet but amiable person to the BBC, while others portrayed an arrogant attention-seeker who accepted credit for work he did not do. But there was one place on which they all agreed: when combing through their thoughts for signs of Britton’s wickedness, they found nothing.

Previous coworker Brandon Sideleau says,” It really seems like a Ted Bundy kind situation where you would not imagine such a thing being possible.”

According to court records, Britton, who was born in West Yorkshire in 1971, had a” cruel physical interest” in creatures since he was a child and had started molesting horses when he was 13 years old.

But beyond that, little is known about his children in the United Kingdom.

On his site, Britton said he was inspired to become a scientist by three people- his grandmother, who was an “avid naturalist”, his science professor Val Richards, and Sir David, his position model.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Leeds in 1992, and he then completed his PhD in science at the University of Bristol in 1996. His research focused on the bat hunting strategies.

But his vision was always to leave the UK and study crocodiles, he said in a 2008 meeting. He wanted to redefine the extremely complicated relationship between people and reptiles because he had been fascinated by them since he was a child.

” If people do n’t understand]them], you do n’t really have much hope of trying to convince people they are worth conserving”, he told entertainment news site Den of Geek.

So Britton arrived on the dusty plains of the Northern Territory (NT ), which has the largest saltwater crocodile population on earth, in the middle of the 1990s.

That, Grahame Webb- a pioneer in the field- took the “very, quite motivated” young man under his aircraft at Crocodylus Park, a little zoo and research facility.

Britton gravitated towards filming projects, but also took part in research, including a 2005 study on the potent antibiotic powers of crocodile blood which made global headlines.

He left his wife in 2006 to launch a foe snake consulting firm, and he later accepted a position as an adjunct researcher at Charles Darwin University.

Over Britton’s years in Darwin’s croc research fraternity, some classmates who first thought he was quiet but “nice sufficient” came to view him as an anti-social “odd man out”.

” He was quite up himself … so he was n’t a particularly popular person, but he was reasonably good at his job”, says John Pomeroy, who organised research field work for Crocodylus Park.

Britton burned all the bridge when he quit, despite the fact that Prof. Webb saw himself as a kind of leader who gave him a chance to get his foot in the door and gain experience in filmmaking.

According to Prof. Webb, he allegedly stole a large portion of the team’s work from Crocodylus Park as his own and therefore poached their customers.

” There’s professionals and then there’s experts”, Prof Webb tells the BBC.

” He knew all, and he had a lot of understanding, but that’s diverse. Additionally, liberals are very knowledgeable.

Men like Adam are merely attempting to smuggle terrible news.

Mr Sideleau – who, with Britton, co-founded an assault database called CrocBITE in 2013- tells the BBC a related history. Britton” loved to take funds” for the library but had” previously contributed a single event” to it, Mr Sideleau says. He only paid for the domain name of the website.

But in the broader area, Britton and his dog snake became stars.

After leaving Crocodylus Park, he established himself as a top-notch analyst on croc behavior and made McMinns Lagoon, which at one point housed eight turtles, a top tourist destination.

One former friend and animals scholar, who requested anonymity, tells the BBC,” He had an international position unlike anyone else.”

When Sir David’s Living in Cold Blood film series premiered in 2006, Britton constructed a special enclosure for Smaug, enabling the program to get ground-breaking video of crocodile mating.

Decades later, Britton claimed to have had a “dream come real” working with his hero.

A carnival of TV crews rode through McMinns Lagoon because it was challenging to capture numerous turtle behaviors in the wild.

” If you’ve ever seen an underground picture of a salt snake, there’s a good possibility it’s Huck,” Britton told the NT News in 2018.

Steve Backshall filmed views for his Dangerous 60 video, Man vs Wild’s Bear Grylls paid a visit, and even video producers had Britton’s range.

His knowledge was sought after abroad as well. He helped measure the world’s longest crocodile, captured in the Philippines in 2011, and in 2016 accompanied TV host Anderson Cooper on a dive with wild crocodiles in Botswana for an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Australian director and writer Andrew Traucki tells the BBC,” He was a leader in his field… a nice guy.”

Mr. Traucki and Britton collaborated on the 2019 sequel to the croc horror film Black Water in 2008. He described spending many enjoyable hours on Britton’s property, kept company by his” awesome” Swiss Shepherds.

The zoologist was already using his own animals and allegedly trying to get other dog owners to give him theirs, the court was told.

He would find people who would frequently reluctantly give their pets away and promise to give them a” good home” using the online marketplace Gumtree Australia.

If anyone reached out for updates, he would tell them” false narratives” and send them old photos.

The dogs were usually already dead after experiencing indescribable suffering inside a shipping container with recording equipment, which Britton described as his” torture room.”

Over the 18 months leading up to his arrest, he tortured at least 42 dogs, killing 39 of them.

” This is the thing that’s sort of haunted me since I’ve heard … you would have never picked him for that,” Mr Traucki says.

The news similarly rocked the broader community. Despite the fact that the death penalty has been outlawed in Australia since 1985, hundreds of people have joined social media platforms to follow his case, and some have even attended court hearings in his case.

A small crowd even went to Darwin to watch Britton’s sentence read aloud while his too graphic details of his crimes were read aloud.

They wanted to be a visible symbol of the horror of the neighborhood and a voice for the pet owners who were swindled by Britton, the majority of whom are still too traumatized and guilt-ridden to speak out.

” I would look at that man and think,’ What an intelligent and kind man’, and then to learn of what he had done … I did n’t sleep for three weeks, “one of the attendees Natalie Carey says.

In retrospect, many former friends of Britton claim that there were times when he seemed uncaring.

However, everyone contends that there was genuinely no sign of his cruelty or violence.

We did n’t even witness him stifling grasshoppers to watch their suffering. He was n’t one of those people,” Prof Webb says.

When you realize that someone you know has been so mentally messed up and that you were n’t sharp enough to notice and take action, it’s just sad.

” You do feel a sense of responsibility.”

Mr. Britton’s attorney claimed that since he was a child, he had had intense, atypical sexual interests as a result of a rare disorder.

But in his apology letter, Britton accepted” full responsibility” for the” pain and trauma “he had caused and promised to seek treatment.

” I will find a path towards redemption, “he wrote.