A child molester who smuggled a boy into prison to be abused by a York man ranked among Britain's most dangerous paedophiles was jailed for five years today.

Gerald Frank, 79, entered into a grotesque pact with Stephen Carruthers, formerly of Wenlock Terrace, York, to provide the ten-year-old as a 40th birthday present for him in jail.

Carruthers, already serving a seven-year jail term for paedophile crimes - then molested the ten-year-old under the noses of prison guards.

He spent 30 minutes with the boy in communal visiting rooms with other inmates before staff at Strangeway jail in Manchester noticed him fondling and kissing the youngster as he sat on his knee.

The guards later said they were hoodwinked into believing the boy - known as Child X - was Carruther's son. It emerged Carruthers had been abusing the boy on an earlier occasion while Frank had abused the youngster's older brother.

Well-known in York for abusing young boys in the 1980s, Carruthers had convictions against him in 1981, 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1991.

Included in his catalogue of shame while living in York are a serious sexual assault on a young boy and a serious sex attack on a mentally handicapped 18-year-old, for which he was jailed.

He is awaiting sentence for his part in the prison scandal, but at Manchester Crown Court today Frank, of Stockport Road, Levenshulme, who is now wheelchair-bound, was convicted of two charges of indecent assault.

Sentencing him, Judge Michael Blackburn said: "The audacity of this offence defies belief.

"I am sending a message to other men who are liable to commit this sort of offence that they must be made to understand how seriously the court views these crimes."

Carruthers - who has one of Britain's worst records for paedophilia - was convicted last December of two charges of rape, two charges of false imprisonment, two of indecent assault on a male and one of indecency with a child.

He will be sentenced next month but was warned he faces a life jail term. Outside court, Child X's mother 30, said: "That Carruthers man is not a human being - I could call him an animal but that's too good a term for the likes of him."

Carruthers, a married father of two but a closet homosexual, had a criminal history of paedophilia stretching back 18 years and often tried to keep his past secret moving counties then from house to house.

Since leaving York and moving to Manchester in the 1990s Carruthers married and had two children but was back in court again accused of molesting children.

He was arrested and convicted and branded a 'danger to children' by a judge and was ordered to be supervised for the entire seven years of his sentence after he was convicted of indecently assaulting another boy aged 11.

But within seven months in June 1998 Franks brought Child X into prison.

Police investigating the incident discovered Carruthers had already been secretly preying on the lad and his brother in the run up to his conviction in November 1997.

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