Former vicar beat naked woman with cane

A FORMER vicar who repeatedly beat a woman with a bamboo stick as she lay naked during a decade of “bizarre and cruel” abuse has been given an absolute discharge by a judge who said the Church let down the victim.

Hilary Alflatt, 87, has dementia and is in the final months of his life, Hull Crown Court heard, and Judge Sophie Mckone said she had no other choice than to impose the absolute discharge.

Aflatt, who now lives in a care home, was found to have committed a series of assaults on the woman by a jury earlier this year but did not face a full criminal trial as he was deemed unfit by doctors.

Yesterday, Judge Mckone said that had Alflatt, previously known as Malcolm, been found guilty of the criminal offences he would be facing a prison term “marked in years”.

The judge described how the vulnerable woman turned to Alflatt for support when he was a parish vicar in Sheffield in the 1980s after her husband left her, taking the family’s cash.

The judge said: “He breached the trust that she and the Church has put in him in the most bizarre and cruel way.

“By his own admission he suggested that she take a vow of obedience to him and a vow of poverty.

“She had to kiss his feet when she saw him and called him master.”

The judge said that when, in the 1990s, the woman finally reported Alflatt: “She approached senior members of the Church and again was let down by them in her faith in that the Church really took no proper action.”