August 2007
Sex offender feared for her life
A CONVICTED sex offender once dubbed ‘Rose West without the bodies’ has fled the area “fearing for her life”, according to police.
Christine Thorpe was forced out of her home and has left the district altogether after friends and work colleagues found out she had once been jailed for taking photographs while her husband raped a 16-year-old girl.
Locals were outraged when they discovered the past misdeeds of the woman they knew as ‘Big Christine’, especially because she had been living in a Skerton flat just yards from schools and a children’s playground.
Peter Thorpe and his wife Christine were described as “extremely dangerous people who will pose a considerable risk to children” in a report by Northumbria police. Both had left prison in July 1996 after serving seven years and four months of a 11-year sentence for the rape of a girl of 16, and a series of indecent assaults on young children.
Thorpe, who is in her early 50s, had also been working in a job that involved close contact with children, until her employer uncovered reports of her past court cases on the internet and sacked her.
But Lancashire Police never revealed Thorpe’s presence in the district, saying she was being supervised and they were not obliged to inform anyone because she was not on the Sex Offenders’ Register.
Christine Thorpe and her husband Peter Thorpe, then from Burnley, were released from prison in July 1996 after serving less than seven years of 11-year sentences.
Peter Thorpe had been jailed for raping a 16-year-old girl and a series of indecent assaults on children, and his wife had been convicted for aiding and abetting rape and other sex offences, after what a judge described as “an extreme case of debauchery”.
A spokesman for Lancashire Police said Thorpe briefly returned to the area this week to collect belongings, but would be moving on again.
