November 2016

Convicted killer is jailed for 12 years after raping child

A convicted killer who burnt his girlfriend to death has now been jailed for 12 years for raping a child in Derbyshire.

Anthony Frost, jailed in 2004 for 10 years for manslaughter and arson, has now been convicted of sickening sex crimes against two young girls during the 1980s.

Frost forced himself on a teenage girl, put his hands around the back of her neck and pulled down her trousers and her underwear and raped her, Derby Crown Court was told.

The 57-year-old also sexually assaulted another girl, who was aged under 10 at the time.

The court heard that the teenager was raped by Frost in the late 1980s in Holbrook but that she was “still haunted” by him and still “wakes up crying” almost 30 years after it took place.

His second victim was “a likeable and innocent little girl who he took his disgusting sexual needs out on”.

The attacks took place in Holbrook in the late 1980s and early 1990s – before Frost, then of Park Road, Belper, was jailed in 2004 for 10 years for manslaughter and arson.

The hearing was told how in that case he pushed a burning bag through the letterbox of his former partner’s Belper home after he dialled a wrong number, heard a man’s voice and thought that she had found a new lover.

The house set on fire and 33-year-old Sarah Jane Dudley, a mother-of-two, was heard screaming as she became trapped in a bedroom. She died from the effects of smoke inhalation.

Stephen Kemp, prosecuting the rape and sexual assault case today at Derby Crown Court, said the two victims decided to come forward to police in 2015 after they both discovered they had been sex victims of Frost.

Frost, now of Elizabeth Walk, Northampton, pleaded guilty to one count of raping a child and another of sexually abusing a child.

Sentencing Frost, Judge Robert Egbuna said of the attack on the younger girl: “This was a dreadful thing to do a young girl, she was a child and you chose to gratify yourself with her.

“You heard what the reaction was (to the other victim). She says the whole set of circumstances have been a nightmare for her and she wakes up still recording the events that happened to her when she was a young girl.”