Latest Offenders Dumfriesshire

Description

Convicted rapist jailed for posing as lottery winner to breach sexual harm prevention order

Leon Pedley, 34, of Latimer Road, Annan, has been jailed for two years and eight months after posing as a lottery winner and offering a woman £60,000 to spend a weekend with him at a Carlisle hotel.

The deception was a breach of his sexual harm prevention order, imposed after his 2012 conviction for “abduction and rape” in Scotland. The order bans him from any face-to-face contact with a woman unless approved in advance by his offender manager.

Prosecutor Brendan Burke told Carlisle Crown Court that Pedley cynically duped a vulnerable woman. Pedley spent the weekend with her at the hotel. It was accepted he did not have the £60,000 he promised. An earlier hearing was told there appeared to be “deliberate targeting.” Burke described the incident as a “deliberate breach” of the order.

Days before the encounter, Pedley had been released from jail for similar offending. He had served 23 months after posing as a millionaire to gain “sexual favours,” offering a woman £4,000 to meet and another £4,000 if she would have sex with him. She received no money.

Pedley was investigated for an alleged rape during the hotel stay, but prosecutors took no further action.

Judge Michael Fanning imposed the sentence. Pedley remains on the Sex Offender Register.

Description

A PAEDOPHILE who began raping children on his 12th birthday paid tribute to murdered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail, it has emerged.

Kristofer Johnstone, now 33, preyed on two girls in a 15-year campaign of abuse.

And in a horrifying twist, a picture of him holding a heart-shaped balloon in memory of tragic Alesha was shared online before he was unmasked as a beast.

Alesha, of Airdrie, was raped and murdered by fiend Aaron Campbell, then 16, who abducted her as she visited her grandparents and dad on Bute in 2018.

Johnstone, of Kelloholm, Dumfriesshire, was convicted after a trial at the High Court in Glasgow of abusing the children — aged between five and 11.

He struck between his 12th birthday on February 28, 2003 and 2018, in Glasgow’s Knightswood, nearby Maryhill, Paisley and on the Isle of Bute.

Caging the married dad of two for ten years this month, judge Alasdair MacFadyen said: “The evidence of sexual abuse was overwhelming, alarming and distressing.

“As a teenager and an adult, you committed serious offences against young children. Your actions appeared motivated by your deviant sexual desires.”

He was also put on the sex offenders register indefinitely and banned from contacting both his victims.

Monster Campbell, now 21, of Bute, was jailed for at least 27 years, cut to 24 on appeal, in 2019.

We told how he struck up a warped pen pal relationship with a caged sex offender.

He rarely leaves his cell for fear of attacks by fellow cons sickened by his crimes.

He was brutally beaten in 2022 in his cell at Polmont Young Offenders.