November 2014
Tamworth pensioner, 78, jailed after sexual assault of seven-year-old girl
A PENSIONER who sexually assaulted a young girl in Tamworth has been jailed for four and a half years by a judge.
Stafford Crown Court heard how loner Gordon Neill (78) indecently assaulted the seven-year-old girl while she was sitting on his lap in the garden of a sheltered scheme in Tamworth in April this year.
Neill had provided chocolate for children in the garden.
Miss Amy Jacobs, prosecuting, said the little girl’s sister saw what happened and their mother was told about it as soon as she arrived.
Neill was arrested the same day, his home was searched and also his camper van. Inside the van was a camera which contained five photographs Neill had taken of another young girl. Miss Jacobs said the prosecution had been unable formally to identify the girl in the pictures, which were taken last summer.
Neill, formerly of Glenfield, Lower Park, Kettlebrook, but now of no fixed address, admitted sexually assaulting the seven year old and taking indecent photos of a child.
Recorder Miss Tracey Lloyd-Nesling told him: “You absolutely don’t understand the gravity of what you were doing. You do now accept you have a sexual interest in children.”
In jailing him, the judge said she took in to account the fact the defendant was 78 years old.
The court heard that Neill had a previous conviction for a sexual offence. In 1971 he and a female accomplice took two teenage girls – not children – away in a car and indecently assaulted them.
Mr Andrew Jackson, defending, said the sexual assault on the little girl had been brief and did not involve penetration. The photographs of the other girl were in the least serious category.
“He has been evicted from his accommodation, he is homeless and friendless at the age of 78.”
