Sex offender admits breach after moving in with mother and child

A paedophile was invited to live with an unsuspecting mother and her child after she met him on an internet chatroom.

Convicted sex offender Keith Mowatt was already banned from having any unsupervised contact with children and had another case pending when he met the woman online.

She had no idea he had been involved in the sexual abuse of children when she invited Mowatt to move in to her Perth home towards the end of last year.

Mowatt still gave no indication of his past when the mother asked him to look after primaryher seven year old son during the October school holiday.

It was only when the police arrived to speak to Mowatt on another matter that it came to light that he was a convicted paedophile with a ban on being alone with under-16s.

Mowatt, 34, from Edinburgh, was jailed for seven months yesterday when he admitted breaking bail conditions by repeatedly being alone with a child.

Mowatt, whose previous offences involved underage girls, claimed he thought the bail condition might only have applied to girls and not to young boys.

Perth Sheriff Court was told that the mother had forgiven Mowatt and become engaged to him while he was being held on remand in Perth Prison.

Sheriff Lindsay Foulis noted that Mowatt had previously been convicted of child sex offences in 2012.

He was subsequently jailed for a year at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for the 2017 offence that he was on bail for at the time of the Perth case.

“This is a very serious breach,” Sheriff Foulis said.

“It is entirely appropriate to impose custody.”