Corrie chief guilty of bid to groom girl
COP STING CAPTURED DOWD
A CORONATION Street director has been found guilty of attempting to groom a 13-yearold girl in a police sting.
Paedophile Tim Dowd, 66, who also worked on Emmerdale, has been warned by a judge he could be jailed.
The disgraced film-maker asked the victim – who he believed to be a 13-yearold girl in care but who was actually an undercover police officer – to send photographs of her breasts.
Dowd, a grandfather, from Harrogate, North Yorks, lost his wife and job after his arrest.
The jury found him unanimously guilty of four child sex offences at Leeds Crown Court. He will be sentenced on March 21 and must now sign the sex offender register.
Dowd tried to persuade the teen decoy to have phone sex via WhatsApp. Rupert
Doswell, prosecuting, said that in January last year a West Yorkshire Police officer created an online profile called Chantelle13Cymru, “indicating her age was 13”.
Dowd contacted Chantelle and asked her whether she was 13 and saying that was “not a problem”.
Mr Doswell said: “From the outset he was overtly sexual.”
Dowd texted: “Have you been with an older man yet? Did he f*** you? Did you suck his c***?”
He also tried to get Chantelle to perform a sex act.
Dowd was arrested at his then marital home in East Keswick, near Leeds.
He was found guilty of three counts of attempting to cause a girl aged 13 to engage in sexual activity and one count of attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child.