‘Devious’ Jehovah’s Witness jailed for raping young girls
AN “ARROGANT” Jehovah’s Witness subjected two girls under the age of 13 to years of systematic assaults and rapes.
Roy Collins, 80, was branded as “devious, righteous and arrogant” by a judge at Swansea Crown Court.
He had spent a decade systematically grooming, abusing and raping the two girls.
At one point during his campaign of abuse, one of their mothers burst into the Jehovah’s Witness church in Swansea and publicly accused him of being a paedophile only to receive a letter from his solicitors warning her not to harass him.
Carline Rees QC, for the prosecution, read out impact statements from the two victims. One said she had lived with the abuse for years before telling her family.
When she did so, the news had a “devastating effect” on her mother.
She said the abuse had an “significant impact” on her life, adding: “Every day I am happy if I can just make it through”.
In her statement, the second victim said the abuse had led to her have trouble at school and to start taking drugs to try to “block out” what was happening. She said her suffering and pain continues to this day.
The court heard that one of the victims made a complaint about Collins in the 1990s, but he was not prosecuted. The allegations were reported to the police again in 2013 – but it took five years for the matter to come to court.
Judge Geraint Walters told the defendant that his actions during the 1980s and 90s had been “truly wicked”.
He said Collins had lived behind veil of respectability partly through his contact with the Jehovah’s Witness church.
The judge said that an example of his deviousness was the fact that when the allegations against him started to be investigated, he went to his GP claiming that he had suffered erectile dysfunction for the past 30 years.
Judge Walters said: “You are, in my judgement, a devious man, a selfrighteous and arrogant man. You have shown no remorse what-so-ever towards your victims or anybody else.
“You have lived the better part of you life, you have been able to do that – your victims have not.
“There is no sentence I can pass that will restore the lives of the victims to what they might have been but for your behaviour.”
He added that the case showed that when allegations of sexual abuse were made, they should be tested and investigated not disbelieved.
He called the the five-year delay in the case eventually coming to court “unforgivable”.
But he praised the officer who eventually took over the case and saw it through to conviction, saying that for the first time the victims had been treated with the dignity they deserved.
David Leathley, for Collins, said his client had become a born-again Christian in the late 1990s, talks at length about a loving God, and “genuinely sees himself as an instrument of the creator”.
He said that for all the wickedness his client had been convicted of, he had turned his life around and spent the last 25-years doing good works in the community.
Collins, of Longford Crescent, St Thomas, Swansea, had previously been found guilty of 26 counts of indecent assault, indecency, and rape at trial when he appeared in the dock at Swansea Crown Court for sentencing.
Collins was given an extended sentence of 23 years, comprising 22 years in custody and a one-year extended licence period as an “offender of particular concern”.
He will be on the sex offenders register for life.