"Child sex predator snared by his own distinctive tattoo"

[dutchman]

It was captured on images and videos of himself



When a mother found worrying messages her 15-year-old daughter had been exchanging with a Nuneaton man, she took over the chat and agreed to meet up with him.

And after Robert Rogers was arrested when he turned up expecting to meet the schoolgirl for sex, the police found images of him abusing an even younger girl.

He pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity, travelling to meet a child following grooming, sexual assault and taking indecent images of a four-year-old girl.

Rogers, 34, of Lomond Way, Nuneaton, who also admitted making other indecent images of children, was jailed for a total of six years and ordered to register as a sex offender for life.

Believing Rogers was grooming her daughter, the mother took over the exchange of messages posing as the teenager.

Still thinking he was chatting to the girl, Rogers asked for pictures of her and sent images of himself naked from the waist down, on which a distinctive tattoo was visible on his arm.

Eventually he said he wanted to meet her, and as he waited on a Nuneaton pub car park he was confronted by the mother and a friend who called the police.

When he was arrested, Rogers, who had turned up with a chocolate-flavoured condom, commented: "I’ve ruined my life over a stupid mistake. I should have stopped, but I couldn’t."

Judge Potter told Rogers: “The first offences concern your attempts to communicate with a 15-year-old child and then to meet her, and then offences against [the four-year-old] which were photographed or videoed against the context of your decision to search out images of children being sexually abused.”

In relation to the 15-year-old he said: “Your messages were increasingly sexualised and you sought to exchange images – but you were not happy to just exchange images, you suggested meeting up.

“You, a 33-year-old male twice the age of the individual you had started to communicate with, went to a car park with the expectation that you were going to meet that girl, and it is plain what you had in mind. Happily that was prevented by her mother.

“I do not accept it was ‘a stupid mistake'. It was a calculated act.”

In relation to the four-year-old, the judge remarked: “It is abundantly plain you have a highly-developed sexual interest in children of that age.."

Rogers was jailed for three years for the offences in relation to the 15-year-old, with a consecutive three-year term for those relating to the four-year-old.