Eton teacher found guilty of abusing boys in rooms
A DISGRACED former Eton College teacher was yesterday found guilty of sexually assaulting pupils in his care at the £40,000-a-year public school.
Married dad Matthew Mowbray, who now faces jail, was convicted of eight counts of sexual activity with four boys after a jury deliberated for six hours.
The 49-year-old, a teacher at the school for 25 years, was acquitted of sexually assaulting a teenage girl.
The offences came to light when one boy told police Mowbray had stroked and ‘basically lay down’ on him while in his pitch-black college bedroom.
After he was arrested in May last year, more pupils came forward with similar reports of disturbing behaviour and detectives found 4,000 indecent images of children on his computer.
Mowbray, who was ‘ renowned’ for taking photos of pupils, later admitted superimposing pictures of them on to internet images of naked children.
He also confessed to secretly filming a boy getting changed in his room.
During a six-day trial, one victim said he felt ‘powerless’ when Mowbray visited his room late at night to fondle him. In later years, he watched from the corridor as the teacher crouched on the floor to peer through the keyhole of a first year pupil’s bedroom.
Another boy said Mowbray would visit his room up to ‘four nights a week’ and a third told the court he often woke up to find his thigh was being rubbed by the teacher. ‘I froze. The room was dark. I wanted to shout to people outside but I felt like I couldn’t,’ he added.
Following the verdict at Reading crown court, Judge Heather Norton warned Mowbray he was ‘inevitably’ facing a custodial sentence.
The father-of-two, of Southampton, will be sentenced later.