A paedophile from Chipping Norton who molested his victim in a bright yellow Mini has had four years added to his sentence.
Malcolm West, now 64, was handed a four year consecutive sentence yesterday morning (Monday, October 23) after he was found guilty of indecently assaulting a child.
He is already serving a dozen years for rape, having been handed a 13 year sentence by a judge in 2018 after he was found guilty of raping a girl in Worcester in the 1980s.
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During his trial at Oxford Crown Court last week, West continued to maintain his innocence to the Worcester matters – saying he had been hamstrung by ill-health.
Standing in the dock on Friday (October 20), West’s shoulders slumped as he heard the foreman read out the first guilty verdict.
He kept his eyes down as the jury returned a further seven guilty verdicts to allegations of indecent assault on a male person dating back more than two decades. He was cleared of separate charges of indecent assault on a male person and sexual assault.
The court was told that the victim was still a schoolboy when he was invited into West’s home office, shown a railway set and molested for the first time.
The sexual abuse, which saw them perform sexual acts on each other, continued for a number of months.
West abused the boy at his home and in a bright yellow Mini said to have had pigs on it. One of the indecent assaults took place when the car was parked outside The Windmill carvery in Burford.
Questioning the likelihood of the abuse being carried out in the lurid motor, defence brief James Keeley played out the scenario to the jury.
“Right, I’m going to get this lad in the car, drive him somewhere and sexually assault him,” he said, setting out his thought experiment.
“You might have thought he wouldn’t want to be driving round in a bright yellow car.”
Closing his client’s case to the jury, Mr Keeley asked the panel of 12 to consider how the boy could have been abused in a room that had no lock on it, in a small house where there was a risk they could be disturbed. The victim’s recollection about there being a train set differed from the accounts of the defendant or his own children.
There had been significant delay in the abuse being reported and no complaint was made at the time, the jury was told. Mr Keeley said the victim had made a claim for compensation.
For the prosecution, Edward Lucas finished his speech with a plea to the 12 jurors: “Look at the face of [the victim]. Look at how he presented towards you and ask yourself this: was he telling the truth? Did he look like he was faking it? And three, members of the jury, ask yourself this: do you think he found any part of it easy to disclose?”
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