Sex offender caught ‘by chance’

A prolific sex offender has been jailed for 11 years, after one of his victims saw him on the street and identified him on Facebook.

Police set up an operation to catch David Hedley, 20, after a series of attacks on lone women and girls, in the West End of Newcastle, over a period of years.

After he was arrested, Hedley told probation officers he had been exposing himself to women since he was 11. Forensics experts had preserved evidence from the scene of some of his attacks, but he was not on any DNA database.