Colin George McKane was sentenced on Tuesday to nine months in jail for tracking down minors for sex after seeing their photographs in a newspaper.

At the time he was the subject of a supervision order imposed after he finished a sentence for kidnapping and molesting a 10-year-old girl.

At his 1998 trial for the abduction and molestation, the Office of Public Prosecutions asked Judge Leo Hart to declare McKane a dangerous offender, so he could be sentenced to prison indefinitely. Judge Hart refused and sentenced McKane to nine years in prison.

At that trial, it emerged that McKane had a long and brutal history of sexual abuse of children, a record police described as one of the worst they had ever seen. He had previously been jailed, in 1995, for phoning children whose picture he had seen in the paper.

''This is Colin George McKane, the paedophile police believe should never be released,'' this newspaper's John Silvester wrote at the time. ''For at least 25 years McKane … has been every parent's nightmare.

''He has attempted to bury a girl alive, abducted girls from the street and made hundreds of obscene phone calls that left children terrified.

''He refused prison sex-therapy programs, flouted parole conditions and reoffended every time he was released from prison.''

In a confidential police report in 1992, McKane was described as ''a real threat to females and children. He is a definite sexual deviant and while serving his last prison sentence for rape, declined … medical assistance and counselling''.

In 1977, a psychiatrist wrote: ''I think he needs to be hospitalised for further psychiatric assessment in his own interest and also in the public interest.''

The parole board found he was ''a long-term recidivist sexual offender, progressing from indecent exposure to indecent assault. Offences had involved knives, scissors and once an unloaded rifle … also notable has been his lack of impulse control, no sense of responsibility, of right and wrong and no remorse.''

In 1984, McKane bashed a 16-year-old girl with a tyre brace in Warrnambool as she was walking home, put her in his car, dragged her to a beach, assaulted her, then dumped her in a hole, covering her with bracken and debris.

The girl escaped while McKane was away. Later that night, when police were examining the scene, McKane returned - with a shovel.

Police believed he was going to bury her.