February 2016: Wheatley has now been released. Living in York.
August 2011
Sex-abuse driver jailed for nine years
A COACH and lorry driver has been jailed for nine years after he abused children on trips.
Christopher George Wheatley, 48, involved four youngsters in a string of 15 sex crimes spread over more than a decade, York Crown Court heard.
Wheatley, now of Cromer Street, Clifton, had previously committed three serious sexual offences against a child.
He shook continually in the dock as Judge Michael Mettyear told him: “Your conduct towards these children was appalling and disgraceful.”
Wheatley pleaded guilty to one offence of attempted rape, one of sexual assault, four of sexual activity with a child, one of causing a child to engage in sexual activity, five offences of indecent assault, and three other sexual offences.
Nicholas Barker, prosecuting, said Wheatley’s latest offences began when he was working as a lorry driver in the 1990s.
He took a friend’s son, then aged nine or ten, with him on two overnight trips, and abused him when the pair lay down to sleep in the vehicle’s cab. He also bought the boy a present.
In the next decade he became a coach driver and committed a string of offences. They included taking a 12-year-old boy with him on a coach trip to Newcastle and abusing him after the passengers had disembarked; kissing a girl aged nine or ten sexually on a different coach trip and trying to rape her on another occasion, and abusing a second girl, aged eight to ten, in York. He knew all the children’s parents.
For Wheatley, James Bourne-Arton said he had tried to kill himself twice and understood the impact of his offences on the children. He suffered from ill-health.
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