Facing jail, child abuser who targeted single mums
A PAEDOPHILE who trawled online dating websites to find vulnerable single mothers so he could sexually abuse their children is facing jail.
James Smith, 32, used website Plenty of Fish to track down women before starting relationships with them.
He used different identities, including Steven Smith and Richard Noble, to allow him to set up accounts on the site.
But this was a front to access children, whom he later subjected to sexual assaults
‘He is bad and he makes us sad’
– including three attacks on a five-year-old girl outside her primary school.
Smith, of Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, began talking to one woman after messaging her on Plenty of Fish and arranged to meet her after she had attended T in the Park in July 2012.
The pair met in Falkirk before he spent the night at her house and almost immediately began a relationship with her.
He was then introduced to her four-year- old son, whom he later subjected to a sex attack.
The relationship broke down in early 2013, but the boy later told his father Smith had assaulted him and police were called.
Smith was arrested and bailed on condition that he stayed away from children.
But he started another relation- ship in 2014 with a woman from Motherwell, Lanarkshire, and abused her daughter.
A trial at Hamilton Sheriff Court saw Smith force his two young victims to give evidence by videolink after he denied two allegations of sexual assault between January 2012 and January 2015.
The girl told the court he had molested her in a car as he dropped her off at school.
She said: ‘He would say, “Tickle, tickle”. He said that in the car, I was sitting on my booster seat and school was starting. He done that three times. It’s a dark blue car and I was in the front.
‘I was sad and I told my mum as well and she was crying, she said he was going to get the jail. He is bad and he makes us sad.’
The boy’s mother told the court Smith called himself Steven when she met him in 2012.
She said: ‘He said he couldn’t come and meet me until after I’d been to T in the Park. He said he came from Edinburgh but he didn’t say exactly where. He came through on the train and we went to the pub in Falkirk.’
She added: ‘I found out he was lying about his name and that is why I left the house.
‘It wasn’t really Steven but it was James. He told me he changed his name by deed poll.
‘I just couldn’t trust him after that.
‘I’d left James alone with my son. They were together because he used to watch him so I could go to work. I had no reason to think that he would do what he did to my son.
‘My son then told his dad what had happened and I told the police.’
The jury took only 20 minutes to convict Smith.
Sheriff Thomas Millar deferred sentence for reports and placed him on the sex offenders’ register.
Smith, who was granted bail, refused to comment.