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A serially-convicted paedophile has lost an appeal against his latest prison sentence.
Former teacher Michael Costin, who molested a string of boys across two decades, insisted he received no sexual gratification from his crimes and only abused his victims for their own benefit.
The sex offender’s victims spoke out at a two-day sentencing hearing last July, describing the decades of torment they had suffered because of his abuse.
One aided police from beyond the grave, having died but left behind a letter detailing Costin’s crimes and their impact.
Costin, then 59, was sentenced at Snaresbrook Crown Court last year to 15 years in prison, after being convicted of 22 offences of indecent assault.
The crimes began in the 1980s, when he served as a young scout leader at St Augustine’s Church in Rush Green, Romford.
He continued abusing children in the 1990s in Sussex, where he worked as a teacher in Ipswich and volunteered as a scout leader in Kirton.
He performed sex acts on boys aged 11 to 15 and “encouraged some boys to engage in sexual activity with each other”.
Judge Alex Gordon described the crimes as “repeated, brazen, manipulative and abusive offending”.
One victim said Costin had created an environment where such offending was “normalised”.
The now 60-year-old paedophile, known to victims as Mick, was already serving an indeterminate prison sentence for public protection before the latest charges, having racked up a catalogue of prior child sex convictions.
He was first convicted of abusing scouts in Sussex in 1996 and jailed for two years.
After his release, he relocated to Abingdon in Oxfordshire where, in 2007, he began abusing a 13-year-old boy. Over time, the boy’s girlfriend was also introduced into the abuse. Costin plied them both with drugs and booze and molested them, a court later heard.
By the time he was brought to justice for his Abingdon crimes, Costin had returned to Romford and become chairman of Millwall Rugby Club on the Isle of Dogs, despite already being a convicted child molester.
When he was prosecuted for the Oxfordshire crimes, he also faced prosecution for molesting a 17-year-old boy in a vehicle outside the east London rugby club.
It was after these convictions that he received his indeterminate sentence.
Appealing against his latest sentence, Costin argued the lengthy investigation into the most recent charges had affected his prospects of parole from that existing indeterminate sentence.
He had been eligible for parole since 2015, if a parole board could be persuaded he was safe to release.
But after the new investigation began in 2017, he was “returned to closed conditions” in prison, which “blocked any progress as regards his release on temporary license or for a period of testing prior to release into the community”.
Barrister Sarah Morris said there were then “unjustified delays” in bringing Costin to trial.
But prosector Walton Hornsby countered that while the first complainant came forward in 2017, others followed in 2021 and 2022, with police ultimately investigating “a large number of offences”.
Three High Court judges – Lord Justice Fraser, Mr Justice Hilliard and Mr Justice Constable – upheld the 15-year sentence, saying Costin was at least partly to blame for the delays.
“The appellant did not admit some of the offences until a very late stage in the proceedings and continued to deny others,” they wrote.
“Had the appellant admitted the offending at the beginning of the investigative process, no doubt he would have been sentenced far earlier in time than he was.”
They added that while it was possible he might have received parole, that was “entirely hypothetical" and “speculation”.
Even if he had, they said, he would have been released “in ignorance of the true scale of [his] offending”, given he now has 22 further convictions for offences he had never admitted in custody, despite rehabilitation courses encouraging him to admit and express remorse for all his crimes.
Instead, he denied offences which jurors later convicted him of and “was still claiming he had not received sexual gratification for himself from the offending, but had been seeking to enable the victims to receive pleasure for themselves”.
“Had these factors been known about by the parole board… they would have been bound to have had a considerable impact upon the assessment of risk that he presented,” the judges wrote.