WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
The Outback Wrangler Matt Wright has given a home to a pet crocodile that once belonged to a disgraced zoologist who filmed himself raping, torturing and murdering dogs.
British crocodile expert Adam Britton, 53, was sentenced to ten years behind bars in the Northern Territory Supreme Court in August after pleading guilty to 63 charges of bestiality, animal cruelty, and possessing child abuse material.
Britton – who made a name for himself on BBC documentaries and once welcomed Sir David Attenborough to his home – sourced the dogs from Gumtree Australia over a two-year period for the sole purpose of torturing them to death on camera.
He would tell the former owners their pets were enjoying their new home – when really they were already dead.
When Britton was arrested in 2022, his two Swiss shepherds Ursa and Bolt and his crocodile Smaug were rehomed.
Daily Mail Australia understands Smaug was taken to live on a property owned by Wright, who has been made famous by various TV series featuring his conservation efforts.
On Sunday, Britton’s ex-wife Erin – a fellow biologist – broke her silence in an episode of Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes, saying she was so shocked and disgusted when police told her about her husband’s crimes that she was lost for words.
She took viewers on a small tour of the home they shared at McMinns Lagoon, near Darwin, where Britton committed the bulk of his offences while she was away on work trips.
The tour included a backyard swamp where they kept Smaug and an external laundry with a deep freezer, where detectives found a disturbing collection of dog remains.
Erin said: ‘He was mostly likely feeding those to the crocodile.’
Britton operated two Telegram accounts called ‘monster’ and ‘Cerberus’ – the latter being a three-headed dog in Greek mythology – between 2020 and 2022, and used them to engage with like-minded people about animal cruelty and bestiality.
In some of those messages, seen by Daily Mail Australia, Britton told his companions that he derived sexual pleasure from dead dogs.
During the episode on Sunday, Erin was asked whether Britton fed dog carcasses to Smaug to get rid of the evidence.
She replied: ‘Yes, of course’.
Since her ex-husband’s arrest, Erin said she has been asking how she didn’t notice what he was doing.
‘The question I’ve been asking myself every day is, “Why did I not know? What did I miss?”,’ she said.
‘Scratching my head, trying to look, trying to play back events of the last few years to see if there’s any detail or anything, but there’s nothing.’
She now describes Britton as a ‘psychopath’ who destroyed her life.
Erin doesn’t read his prison letters anymore – partly because he didn’t take responsibility for his actions.
When he was first arrested, he would write to her about topics he was interested in and books he wanted to read – even asking her to send one about dog domestication, breed history and behaviour.
She said it messed with her head.
‘He’s writing about this as if he can, sort of, continue his fantasies in his mind, and it makes me really angry,’ she said.
‘I cannot comprehend still how somebody can be so depraved, so evil, and how he’s just destroyed my entire life.’
When they met before 2004, Erin thought she had found her soulmate – they had shared interests, built a consulting company together called Big Gecko, which sold footage of crocodiles to television and film directors.
They worked with natural history shows with the BBC and National Geographic.
Meanwhile, Smaug became something of a celebrity in his field and appeared in two horror films.
While their life together was idyllic to begin with, their relationship began to disintegrate within the years before his arrest.
They were both away for long periods of time on expeditions, but slept in separate beds when they were both home and hadn’t been romantically involved for years.
Sentencing remarks by NT Chief Justice Michael Grant outlined Britton’s lifelong struggle with the socio-sexual disorder, paraphelia and zoosadism.
He was never attracted to humans and struggled to have proper relationships with women when he was a university student in Hong Kong and the UK. He had two female partners, but they were not sexual relationships.
After graduation, the judge said he had a ‘brief’ sexual relationship with a woman who worked in the animal industry.
‘You attempted to establish a sexual relationship with her but those attempts were obviously hampered by your unorthodox sexual preferences,’ said the judge.
‘Sexual intercourse with your wife was not something you enjoyed and was extremely sporadic as a result.
‘The relationship eventually became entirely platonic and asexual in nature.’
Erin said Britton’s crimes had further inspired her to advocate for animal welfare.
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