April 2008 – Notorious paedophile moves next to school

A depraved paedophile who tried to snatch girls as young as THREE from Ulster’s streets has moved next door to a Co Antrim school.

Ex-rugby star Samuel John ‘Yogi’ Stevenson has been let out of jail more than three years early after almost two decades of preying on young girls to fulfil his sick sex fantasies.

Stevenson recently walked free from Magilligan prison after serving just three-and-a-half years of a seven-year sentence handed down for a litany of sex crimes involving girls as young as three.

Now he has moved into an apartment in leafy Jordanstown, overlooking Whiteabbey Primary School and just yards from a children’s play park.

November 2005

Abuser jailed over 15-year spree

A Newtownabbey man who sexually abused girls as young as four over a 15-year period has been jailed for seven years.

Samuel John Stevenson, of the Firs, Redwood, admitted 47 sex charges including nine of indecent assault and six of inciting a child to commit gross indecency.

His other offences included having over 500 child internet pornography images, making indecent photographs and showing children some of the indecent images.

Stevenson, 56, was placed on the sex offenders register for life.

Belfast Crown Court was told that Stevenson got away with committing abuse against young girls for up to 15 years because no-one reported him.

He was finally caught on 8 May last year, four days after a woman noted his car registration after seeing two young girls running away from the vehicle.

The court heard that following his capture the former rugby player admitted his guilt telling detectives how he would approach girls, some as young as four, in his car.

After showing them indecent photographs he had downloaded from the internet, he would offer them 50p or sweets so he could abuse them.

Many of the offences were committed in north Belfast, but Stevenson also admitted preying on children in Ballymena and Carrickfergus.

Stevenson told police that he first struck in the Ballyduff area 10 to 15 years ago, when he approached two girls aged eight or nine and offered them money to strip. One did, while the other ran away.

He claimed it was another two to three years before he struck again.

Although an assistant manager at the Antrim Forum leisure centre for 20 years, Stevenson denied ever abusing any children there, telling police: “It doesn’t work that way”.

He was ordered to serve another three years on probation on his release.

Pearl Gray, of the Rape Crisis Centre, called for longer sentences for offenders such as Stevenson.

“This man has destroyed the lives of many families not only in Belfast, but around the whole of Northern Ireland.

“Where people like him are concerned the public need to know and to make noise and to demand and ask their MPs to change the law to extend the length of jail time they can receive”, she said.