Ex-parish councillor paedophile died while serving 12 year jail time

‘Monster’ Peter Orme, who got children to fight in a makeshift boxing ring until they bloodied each other, died at the John Radcliffe Hospital on February 22 – having been rushed to the Oxford hospital from Bullingdon prison, near Bicester, hours earlier.

The 79-year-old sex offender had heart and respiratory problems and had been refusing to take medication for heart problems, his inquest heard on Tuesday (October 3).

Head of healthcare at HMP Bullingdon, Jacqui Burnett, said: “Mr Orme very much knew his own mind. There was never any doubt he didn’t have capacity to make his own decisions.

“He always remained in good spirits and he was always very jovial and friendly. But he was very assertive in [saying] ‘I’m not taking that, yes I understand, no I don’t want it’.”

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Prison GP Dr Alistair Hallam said in a statement summarised by senior coroner Darren Salter that Orme would sit chatting with other wheelchair users. They had a kind of support group that shared ‘banter and conversation’, he said.

A post-mortem concluded the prisoner died from pneumonia and heart disease, contributed to by type-two diabetes.

The prisons and probation ombudsman’s clinical review of Orme’s case found that the support he received in prison was ‘partially equivalent’ to the care he would received in the community.

The ombudsman made recommendations, already implemented, around how prison clinical staff scored how ill patients were and escalated so-called National Early Warning Scores (NEWS) to senior medics.

Coroner Mr Salter recorded a conclusion of natural causes.

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Orme, a former member of Woughton Community Council in Milton Keynes, was jailed for 12 years in February 2022 after he was convicted of sexually and physically abusing children from the 1970s to 90s.

Peter Orme, who was a former parish councillor (Image: Bucks Free Press)

Judge Geoffrey Payne said Orme inflicted ‘wicked and systematic cruelty’ on his victims.

“Over the course of the trial, you dismissed them as conspirators,” he said of the ex-councillor’s victims.

“They were telling the truth, they were believed and their accounts were heard.”

One of the female victims who took to the witness box to read her statement to the court said: “The hardest thing was telling my children that monsters do exist.

“I think the mental torture was just as bad as the physical, the gaslighting, the mental abuse, even now when people speak to me, I question what’s behind it – he used to play mind games.”