Sick pervert abused 10-year-old girl in home-made 'torture den'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2018 5:15 pm
The schoolgirl has been praised as a "brave survivor who has helped bring a predator to justice"
A man who held a young girl captive in his ‘torture den’ and sexually abused her has been jailed for 22 years.
Pervert David Challenor subjected the 10-year-old girl to horrific sexual abuse and even gave her electric shocks.
He also took photographs of the youngster being tortured and abused to help him relive the sick ordeal he had put her through.
When he was arrested, Challenor accused the girl of being a liar and a fantasist – but the police found the gruesome attic kitted out just as she had described, a jury has heard.
Despite that, he pleaded not guilty to charges including false imprisonment, rape, gross indecency, sexual assault, indecent assault and assault causing her actual bodily harm.
Challenor, 50, of Charterhouse Road, Lower Stoke, also denied taking indecent images of her, making indecent images of children by downloading them, and possessing prohibited images.
But after almost nine hours at the end of an 11-day trial, the jury at Warwick Crown Court found him guilty of all but one of the charges of taking indecent images by unanimous verdicts.
Jailing him for 22 years, Recorder Nicholas Syfret QC also found him to be "an offender of particular concern".
That means that instead of automatically being released after serving half of his sentence, Parole Board will decide whether he will be freed at that stage.
And he may end up serving longer than that or even the whole 22 years before being released, after which he will be on licence for an additional 12 months.
Challenor was jailed for 19 years for the offences against the girl, with a consecutive three-year term for the images, and ordered to register as a sex offender for life.
Recorder Syfret told him: “It is hard to comprehend how you could behave with such depravity. The harm done by you to her is hard to overestimate.”