Description
A HOMELESS man who fled from justice after having sex with a vulnerable drunken teenage schoolgirl has been locked up for four-and-half years. Laurence Joseph Stringer left his under-age victim so traumatised by her ordeal that she took an overdose of paracetamol the following day.
A HOMELESS man who fled from justice after having sex with a vulnerable drunken teenage schoolgirl has been locked up for four-and-half years.
Laurence Joseph Stringer left his under-age victim so traumatised by her ordeal that she took an overdose of paracetamol the following day.
But after being charged with having sexual activity with a child he was granted bail - and fled to the South Coast where he spent two months on the run.
The 50-year-old, who was tracked down in Surrey, was sentenced to four and half years at Manchester Crown Court after admitting what he had done.
The court heard that on August 15 last year Stringer lured the girl, who has learning difficulties, back to the tent where he lived near a canal towpath on the outskirts of Hyde.
Earlier that evening she had been boozing with friends in the town centre after an argument with her family.
Loitering
Stringer was loitering in the area and when he heard that she did not want to go home, and knowing she was drunk, he invited her to go back to the tent with him.
After fleeing from Stringer's clutches the girl slept rough outside a B&Q store.
After returning home and taking the pills she was rushed to hospital, where she told police what had happened to her.
A DNA match identified Stringer and the victim was later able to show the police his lair in the bushes.
Stringer, who has a previous conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse, was arrested on September 3 when his tent was searched.
There, officers found a scrapbook of pictures of young teenage girls around the age of 13 and 14 that had been torn from magazines.
Stringer's victim has been plagued by nightmares of her ordeal, the court heard.
Defending, Neil Usher said that although Stringer had a previous conviction for sleeping with an underage girl it was not 'something he regularly engages in'.
He added that Stringer maintained he had not raped the victim.
Sentencing, Judge Anthony Hammond told Stringer: "Force or otherwise, you had no business having intercourse with girl of that age and that's the moral situation.
"Had you been convicted of raping this girl you would be facing a dickens of a sentence. As it is it's a serious offence to have intercourse with a girl of this age. This was a girl with terrible problems in respect of personality and intellectual capacity and you took advantage of her."
Ordering Stringer to sign the sex offenders' register for life, Judge Hammond told him that when he was finally released from prison he would have said he still had to keep police informed of his movements even if though he went back to sleeping rough. was a rough sleeper.
He said: "If you live on a park bench you tell them you are living on a particular park bench and if you change it you tell them again. Otherwise, you will be in real hot water and you will be going down for a very long time."
Last month an MEN exclusive highlighted the problem of bail-jumpers. 1871 people - including at least one murderer and a number of sex offenders - are currently at large.