Locations
The Green, Mancetter, Atherstone, North Warwickshire, Warwickshire, CV9
Description
Bryan Huggins, aged 72, arranged to meet the child at a branch of Tesco, telling her to pretend to be his granddaughter to avoid arousing suspicion
A pensioner groomed what he believed was a 13-year-old girl before travelling to Swansea with massage oil, a vibrator, and Viagra for sex with her, a court has heard. In the 72-year-old's car police also found a role of heavy-duty tape and an audiobook of a story about a girl who was abducted from outside school.
Bryan Huggins checked into a hotel in Swansea and arranged to meet the child at a branch of Tesco, telling her to pretend to be his granddaughter to avoid arousing suspicion. In fact, he had been communicating with a decoy account being run by a so-called paedophile hunter group.
Hannah George, prosecuting, told Swansea Crown Court that on April 7 this year Huggins contacted the profile of an 18-year-old woman on a dating website, and began engaging her in conversation. She said the woman's profile was actually being run by an online vigilante group, and the operator of the account told Huggins that she was in fact 13 not 18.
The pair exchanged mobile numbers and began chatting via WhatsApp. The court heard that over the following days the defendant sent a series of sexual messages including describing the sex acts he wanted to perform on her, talking about the pleasure he would get from washing the girl's back in the shower, and asking her to send him naked photographs.
Huggins then arranged to travel from his home in Warwickshire to Swansea to meet the girl, and booked a room in the Hurst Dene Aparthotel in the Uplands area of the city for the pair to stay in. The prosecutor said he arranged to pick up the child from the Tesco supermarket on Oystermouth Road, telling her to pretend to be his granddaughter so as to not arouse suspicion of staff or shoppers.
On April 12 Huggins drove to Swansea, checked into his room at the hotel, then went to the rendezvous point where he was met by members of the group behind the fake dating profile. Police were called and the defendant was arrested, and this hotel room and car were searched. The court heard that in his room at the Hurst Dene officers found massage oil, Viagra tablets, a vibrator, a hair dryer, a computer memory stick containing erotic fiction written by the defendant, and a laptop computer. In the pensioner's nearby car officers found an audiobook of a story about a schoolgirl who was abducted, a roll of heavy-duty tape, and a diary which contained flight numbers and details.
In his police interview, Huggins admitted he had wanted to give the girl he was supposed to be meeting a full-body massage, wanted to touch her breasts and genitals, and use the vibrator. Bryan Huggins, of The Green, Mancetter, Atherstone, Warwickshire, had previously pleaded guilty to attempting to incident a girl to engage in sexual activity when he appeared in the dock for sentencing.
He has four previous convictions for 13 offences, but none of a sexual nature. Andrew Evans, for Huggins, said the defendant would work with whatever agencies ordered by the court in order to help him understand the "motivations and compulsions" that lay behind the offending. Judge Huw Rees told Huggins he had groomed what he believed to be a 13-year-old girl, and then had planned a meeting and travelled a not insignificant distance to Swansea. The judge noted the author of the pre-sentence considered Huggins to be someone who would have caused lasting psychological damage to any child lift alone in his company.
Following the guidelines, and with a one-third discount for his guilty plea, Huggins was sentenced to 16 months in prison. He will serve up to half that period in custody before being released on licence to serve the remainder in the community. The defendant will be a registered sex offender for the next 10 years and was made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order for the same length of time.