Locations
Kirkby, Liverpool, Merseyside, L32
Description
A paedophile who subjected a young girl to a decade-long campaign of sexual abuse was jailed.
Toxteth man Stephen Furmedge, 52, preyed on his victim, who was between the ages of three and 12, through the late 1970s and 1980s.
But she was not the first child who had her life destroyed by the sick pervert.
He had already been jailed in 1989 for raping a young girl and a young boy, and sexually abusing another girl when he was living in Kirkby and had also been convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old girl in the early 1970s.
Robert Wyn Jones, prosecuting, said that some of the girls earliest memories were of being abused by Furmedge including him kissing her on the lips when she was just three.
The abuse happened weekly over the years and at one point he even tried to rape her when another girl was sharing a double bed with her.
She said the last time he tried to make a pass at her she was 12 and better able to stop him.
The victim said she knew what was happening to the other children, crimes for which Furmedge served nine years after they reported it, but didnt tell police at the time.
Furmedge denied all the accusations but was found guilty by a jury of nine counts of sexual assault, nine of indecency with a child and five of attempted rape.
Judge Andrew Hatton, sentencing, said if Furmedge was being sentenced under todays laws he would have jailed him for life but because he had to be sentenced under the law of the day the maximum he could sentence him to was seven years in jail and he did so.
He added that if the judge sentencing Furmedge in the 1980s knew the full extent of his crimes then he probably would have sentenced him to life as well.