Police who raided Geoffrey Portway's home in Massachusetts last year found a dungeon in his basement equipped with a steel cage, a child-sized homemade coffin and butchering kits.
The 40 year-old had spent months discussing the kidnap and murder online with an American, Michael Arnett.
They discussed real children, by name and photo, whom Arnett claimed to know and have access to.
Portway had a number of online chats with other paedophiles - using the alias Longpig – about a mutual interest in child abduction, murder, and cannibalism.
These chats were accompanied by the trading of online pornography - including images and videos appearing to depict dead children and cannibalism.
Computers found during the raid of his home revealed more than 4,500 pieces of child pornography traded with others online.
Agents also discovered a locked door in the basement, and inside a second door was a dungeon lined with sound-deadening material containing a chair, television and what appeared to be cable access to the internet.
The room also contained a child-sized homemade coffin with exterior locking devices, a steel cage with multiple locking devices, and a steel table top with steel rings at six points, presumably for restraints.
Outside these rooms were a cabinet freezer, an upright freezer, disposable scalpels, butchering kits and castration tools.
The dungeon was described in detail by Portway in recovered chats as a place he intended to use to keep kidnapped children while he sexually abused them and as a place to eventually murder and eat them.
Portway pleaded guilty to soliciting the kidnap of a child and distribution and possession of child pornography and he was sentenced to 26 years and eight months in prison on Tuesday.
Portway's defence said in court that while he needs punishing for child pornography, his plot to murder, kill and keep the child in a dungeon was just fantasy.