Families are said to be concerned after a former nurse dubbed the Canterbury Cannibal has moved into their town.

Dale Bolinger, 62, formerly of Davidson Road in Canterbury, was jailed for nine years in 2014 after being found guilty of arranging to meet a teenager he groomed after telling her he planned to chop off her head and eat her.

According to a national newspaper, he has now been freed because of good behaviour and started a new life in America.

But residents in the small backwater town of Blair, Nebraska, aren’t happy.

One mum said, according to The Sun: “Keep an eye on your kids. Make sure he’s not by your house.”

A jury at Canterbury Crown Court heard how Bolinger revelled in disgusting fantasies in which he claimed to have devoured a five-year-old child.

He went to Ashford International station, believing he was meeting a 14-year-old Mexican girl.

Then aged 58, he had tried to claim he was just out to shock the sick users of a website known as Dark Fantasy Network.

It was there he began talking to someone who claimed she was a 14-year-old girl living with a cousin in Germany. She claimed she wanted to be beheaded.

Bolinger – who worked at the QEQM Hospital in Thanet – said he believed he was talking to a man rather than a child and he was just fantasising.

But the jury heard he arranged to meet “Eva” at Ashford - and the day before their rendezvous went to Homebase, in Broadstairs, and bought an axe.

“Having discussed with her his fantasies in relation to her on more than one occasion, he made arrangements to meet her with the intention of committing a sexual offence on her...” - prosecutor Martin Yale

And they were also told he had attacked a woman two years earlier by putting a dry cleaning solution-soaked cloth over her face.

Bolinger also had a stash or some of the sickest child pseudo-images, depicting youngsters in an oven or being barbecued.

He was arrested after an FBI investigation in America into internet chats about rape, murder and cannibalism.

A psychiatrist ruled Bolinger was not suffering from mental illness and would probably continue to have warped fantasies regardless of his punishment.

Judge Adele Williams described the revelation as “worrying and disturbing” and imposed an order banning him from accessing the internet in future without supervision.

She also told the jury they will never have to serve again, telling them she understood how “distasteful” the case must have been for them.