The Canterbury nurse accused of grooming a 14-year-old girl to decapitate her has told a jury: “I am just a fantasist and a liar!"

Dale Bolinger, 58, has denied going to Ashford International rail station intending to meet the teenager known as Eva.

Wearing a striped tie and dark suit, he told the jury at Canterbury Crown Court how he had lied to police about his cannibal chats with someone claiming to be a Mexican girl living in Germany.

“I lied because I was terrified when I was talking with the police. I panicked."

Even his defence counsel, Paul Jarvis, described Bolinger as "more of a Walter Mitty character than Hannibal Lecter."

The jury has heard how, among the chatlogs, Bolinger talked sometimes “an hour or two a day depending on what we were talking about.”

Bolinger talked about meeting up with “Eva” and wanting to behead her at his home in Canterbury.

“I bought the axe initially to chop some stumps outside my house. I bought the axe at the time because Eva asked me to.

“She insisted that I bought the axe. But the reason I bought the axe was for the stumps. I might have got a hatchet but I thought the axe would be better.”

He also claimed that he thought “Eva” wasn’t a teenage girl but an “adult male” playing a role.

He added: “I can’t pretend that I haven’t been stupid over this and I have made some very serious mistakes.

"But the serious mistakes I have made I have pleaded guilty to.

“But this I don’t accept because I don’t believe that it was a 14-year-old, or a girl or a child at all. It was an adult male.”

Bolinger had travelled to the station in 2012 but “Eva” never showed up, the jury has heard.

The axe – which had been bought a day before the proposed meeting - had been found by police in Bolinger’s bedroom.

“I got it as a prop for our fantasy. It wasn’t intended to have been used in reality.

"The idea that I would actually chop someone’s head off... I had a fantasy with her and wouldn’t have carried that through
to reality.”

The nurse, who worked at a Thanet hospital, has already admitted other charges of administering a poison two years earlier and downloading sick images of children.

The trial continues.