June 2021

Rhyl men jailed for sickening rape of girls in woods and house

A man who raped a young girl in the woods when he was a teenager was sentenced for his crimes today.

Steven Booker was 15 when he raped the 13-year-old in Rhyl in the summer of 1990.

The horrific offence only came to light after the victim became a grown woman and reported the incident.

Today Steven Booker, now 46, of Rhydwen Drive, Rhyl, was jailed at Mold Crown Court for two years and six months for the rape.

His co-accused Nicholas Roberts, also 46, of Cheltenham Avenue, Rhyl, was also jailed for six months for indecently assaulting the girl.

Their victim has lifelong anonymity to protect her identity.

The judge His Honour Judge David Hale, told the defendants in the dock: “I’m going to sentence you for something that you did many years ago, something you hoped would never ever see the light of day, and certainly something you hoped you would never see as a conviction.”

The judge added: “You must have remembered it. You must have been ashamed for what you did to that girl then, when she was 13 and a half.

“You, Mr Booker, would have been 15 and a quarter. You, Mr Roberts, 15 and a half, playing in the woods on a summer’s day.”

The judge said Booker “took it upon yourself to have a sexual experience with her”.

The judge said an aggravating feature was what he said to Roberts, which the court heard was “Wanna go, Nick?”

Jailing Booker for the rape, he also gave him two concurrent sentences of six months each for two indecent assaults.

As for Nicholas Roberts, the judge said the rape and indecent assaults happened “in front of him”

But Roberts was cleared of raping the 13-year-old girl.

Mold Crown Court also heard that about a year after the incident in the woods, Roberts raped a different girl in a house in Rhyl.

“It was a deliberate act on your part”, said the judge.

One victim said the crimes have affected her ability to trust people and to be intimate. The convictions by the jury were a “great weight off her shoulders”.

The other victim said she suffers flashbacks and feels unsafe in Rhyl.

Overall, the judge jailed Booker for two and a half years for the rape in the woods, plus two six-month terms for indecent assaults, both to run concurrently.

Roberts was jailed for two and a half years for the rape in the house, plus six months for the indecent assault and six months for sexual assault of a child aged under 13, making a total of three and a half years’ imprisonment.

He was further given six months in jail for inciting a girl under 13 to engage in sexual activity, to run concurrently.

Both men also received lifelong restraining orders not to contact their victims.

 

May 2021

Paedophile had so many indecent images that police stopped counting

A paedophile had so many indecent images of children on his phones that police stopped counting.

The images – mainly of girls aged one to 15 – were only discovered after Stuart Roy Kearn, 47, failed to tell police about a new relationship he was having with a woman and that he stayed with her some nights.

A previous court order obliged him to do so, Caernarfon Crown Court heard.

Officers swooped and found his two phones with the indecent images and movies on them.

Kearn, of Bath Road, Wrexham, was found guilty of possessing indecent images of children, and admitted breaching a Sexual Harm Prevention Order and also failing to comply with notification requirements.

A judge jailed him for a total of three years and four months.

The prosecution said Kearn and the woman began a relationship and he would stay with her every other evening.

He had been given an 18-month jail term and a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) in June 2016 after he had admitted 13 offences of making images by downloading them from the internet, possessing them and distributing them.

Caernarfon Crown Court heard Kearn had only given his new partner a “sanitised” version of his crimes and had not told her about the SHPO.

When police arrived at his own home in 2019, they found a black Samsung smartphone – which they knew about – but also a white Samsung smartphone which they didn’t.

Police analysed the devices and found 1,279 indecent images and movies of children.

The prosecutor said they stopped counting after that but there were “many thousands more”.

Judge Nicola Jones said there had been a large number of different victims in the images, with some “in discernible pain”.

She told Kearn: “These are not victimless crimes. Children are abused, raped and tortured.”

She jailed Kearn for two years and six months for possessing indecent images in Category A, the most serious.

He also got 16 months and four months imprisonment for possessing indecent images of children in Category B and C, respectively. Both those terms are to run concurrently with the main sentence.

Kearn was jailed for a further ten months for failing to comply with notification requirements – to run consecutively – plus a concurrent, seven-month term behind bars for breaching the SHPO.

June 2016

Child sex abuse images man from Cefn-y-bedd jailed for 18 months

A pervert who admitted downloading and distributing terrible child sex abuse images told a judge he did it simply to try to catch paedophiles.

But Judge Rhys Rowlands rejected the claim as “patent nonsense” and said it was an explanation he had heard several times before.

It was a claim that was “doing the rounds” at the moment, he said, adding that the defendant had probably picked it up on the internet.

Stuart Roy Kearn, 42, of Mold Road, Cefnybedd, admitted 13 offences of making images by downloading them from the internet, possessing them and distributing them.

He had more than 2,700 images and 430 films and possessed extreme images involving sex between humans and animals and was jailed for 18 months, ordered to register with the police as a sex offender for 10 years, and was made subject of a 10 year sexual harm prevention order.

The judge said at the start of yesterday’s sentencing hearing at Mold Crown Court he was not prepared to sentence Kearn on the basis that he got no sexual gratification from it and the defendant was called to give evidence.

He told the court that at the time he had suicidal thoughts, feared there were paedophiles in his area, and when asked what he would have done if he found one he said “beat him to a pulp, I don’t know”.

In his depressed and suicidal state, he said he thought of “taking one with me” but agreed he had not called to police to inform them what he was doing.

He said that looking back now it made no sense and the judge agreed it did not.

Judge Rowlands said it was about the fourth time he had heard that version of events in the last month. “It is clearly doing the rounds,” he said.

Kearn had received such material, stored it no doubt to look at later, and had also distributed it to others. His explanation made “no sense at all,” he said.

Judge Rowlands said the defendant was no doubt sorry for the position he had put himself in and the consequences for him were serious.

But they paled into insignificance to the suffering and corruption inflicted on the young children who had been photographed and filmed. 

“This was quite depraved behaviour on your part,” the judge told him.

He said Kearn appeared to be in complete denial.

It had gone on for three years and the case was aggravated by the young age of the children and the appalling nature of some of the images.

Ffion Tomos, prosecuting, told how the children in the images and films were aged from two upwards.

Kearn was arrested when a warrant under The Protection of Children Act was executed at his home in March last year.

The images were found on a laptop, two USB drives and nine CDs; there was peer to peer file sharing software and email addresses had been set up to share and distribute images.

Interviewed, he claimed he was doing it to trap paedophiles online.

March 2021

Man jailed for sexually assaulting young girl

A man has been jailed for sexually assaulting a young girl in the 1990s.

A judge at Mold Crown Court said he had to exercise his public duty and send Malcolm Whitehall to prison for the indecent assault on a girl under 16, which happened in the late 1990s.

Whitehall, 44, of Tan-y-Coed, Wrexham, was jailed for 18 months and must then spend a year on extended licence.

Prosecutor Jade Tufail said the indecent assault wasn’t reported to the police until December 2018. Whitehall was arrested and denied the offence in February 2019 but was convicted after a trial.

Jailing Whitehall, The Recorder Mr RJ Philpotts, said his actions had left his victim “distressed”.

The judge said Whitehall must register as a sex offender for life.

He also gave the defendant a Sexual Harm Prevention Order and he is prohibited from working with children.

October 2020

Victim confronts her abuser as he’s locked up

A woman has bravely told how she wants the man who abused her as a child to be “too scared to even dream of doing it” to anyone else.

Reading her own victim impact statement at Caernarfon Crown Court today, she said she didn’t want what happened in her past to become her future.

She spoke as David Charles Jones was sentenced to five years in jail after being found guilty of seven counts of indecent and sexual assaults on a child under the age of 13.

The 61-year-old, of Hamlington Avenue, Gwersyllt, Wrexham, was described as a “man of limited intellectual abilities” who showed “no remorse or insight into his victim’s suffering”.

The court heard he inappropriately touched her both on and under her clothing on multiple occasions and made her touch him.

Holding back tears, the woman told the court: “I have found it really difficult to put into words how I’m feeling about things.

“Over the years, I have just got used to keeping things inside, but I knew I was going to have to tell someone as I was unable to sleep as the nightmares were horrible.

“I would punch and pinch my legs out of anger because inside I wanted to scream…I would punch myself hard just to stay awake as the fear of sleeping was just too much.”

She said that, after she told her mum about the abuse years later, the “nightmares got worse” and she now takes antidepressants for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The victim got a job away from North Wales, which she admits may have been an attempt to “run away” as there was “always a chance I’d bump into him”.

She added: “I have put my travels on hold for now so that I can get the help that I need.

“I want to feel normal like other people my age do.

“I never imagined having my own little family.

“For a while, I have decided not to have my own children through fear I’d not be able to protect them from something like this happening to them.

“The devastation in my mum’s eyes the day I told her I will never forget.

“She kissed me gently on my head and said ‘don’t worry, mum will make it all better.’

“I felt like I was little again and just wanted to press a rewind button.”

The woman said: “I don’t want what has happened in my past to become my future.

“I want a life with no more secrets, nightmares and tablets.

“I want to be a mum, a wife and most of all happy.

“I want him to just admit what he has done rather than put me through all this.

“I want him to be too scared to even dream of doing this to another child…He stole part of my childhood I can never get back.”

Sentencing him to five years in jail, judge Nicola Jones said only an immediate custodial sentence was appropriate.

“You subjected her to sexual abuse on a regular basis on multiple occasions,” said the judge.

“At the time, she didn’t know that any of this was wrong and she only reported it to her mother during her adulthood.

“You were convicted after trial…it’s clear that you’ve shown no remorse or insight into her suffering.”

The judge accepted Jones was “previously a man of good character who has worked hard during his lifetime”, and that there was no evidence of any re-offending after the abuse.

“But I am concerned about the attitude towards your offending – you lack insight and in the circumstances, the public, in particular female children, need protection from you,” she added.

Jones was subjected to an indefinite sexual harm prevention order banning him from having any unsupervised contact with any female child under 16.

An indefinite restraining order preventing him from contacting the victim was also imposed.

May 2021

‘MagiMike’ offender, 72, used swingers website to meet couples for group sex

A ‘manipulative’ sex offender got into more trouble for failing to report using a website for adults to share partners.

But Michael Stuart Mason narrowly avoided jail for not coming clean about the “swingers” website.

A judge at Mold Crown Court today gave the 72-year-old an eight-month jail term, suspended for two years, for breaching the notification requirements of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order.

He must also go on a course for men with a sexual conviction to help prevent reoffending.

The court heard Mason had been sentenced on February 4 this year for possessing indecent images and using fake profiles of himself as a woman aged 18 and as a girl, 15, to distribute indecent images of children.

He had received an eight-month jail term, suspended for 18 months, and was made the subject of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order.

As a result, he was duty bound to tell the authorities about his internet use in future.

But when a police officer and an offender manager visited him on February 25, Mason “disclosed he had been meeting other couples for group sex via the internet”, said the prosecutor Elen Owen.

He had the name “MagiMike” but hadn’t registered that user name with police, as he was required to do.

His Honour Rhys Rowlands called Mason a “manipulative individual” who had lied to the safeguarding authorities.

He also said that when Mason had distributed indecent images of children, he had communicated with others of a depraved nature, pretended to be a woman and claimed to have committed acts of abuse against young children.

he judge said: “It’s disgusting. It’s depraved yet you do not seem to realise the extent of your depravity.

“You pose a risk to society as a whole by this deviant behaviour, despite your age. You are a manipulative individual.”

He warned Mason, of Strathalyn, Burton near Rossett, Wrexham, not to put a foot wrong for the next two years or he could face the “desperately uncomfortable” experience of going to prison.

For breaching the suspended sentence, that term was increased from 18 months to two years. He was also fined £500.

The court heard that semi-retired Mason designs parts for classic cars and advertises and sells them on his Facebook page.

February 2021

Wrexham great-grandad sent indecent image of child and engaged in ‘sick conversations

A great-grandad from Rossett claimed to have been hunting paedophiles after he sent indecent images and engaged in “sick” conversations online, a court heard.

Michael Mason, of Strathalyn in Burton, appeared at Mold Crown Court on Thursday for sentencing.