Internet paedophile jailed for five years

A Briton who travelled to Iowa to have sex with a 14-year-old girl he met on the internet apologised in court yesterday as he was jailed for five years.

Barry Beadle, 52, of Merseyside, England, pleaded guilty in September to enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity and travelling with intent to engage in sexual activity with a minor.

The former psychiatric nurse had faced a maximum prison term of 71 months - nearly six years.

The sentence also requires Beadle to get mental health treatment and enrol in a sex offender treatment programme.

That “will ensure you get the help you need and there’s not a repetition of the behaviour,” Judge Robert W. Pratt told Beadle in the Des Moines court.

Beadle’s lawyer, Terence McAtee, read a statement in which Beadle apologised to the court, the government, the girl and her family.

Beadle is “extremely remorseful and embarrassed of his actions,” he said. Asked whether he had anything to say, Beadle pointed to his lawyer: “He said it all for me.”

Prosecutors said Beadle instant messaged the 14-year-old girl, referred to in court papers as Jane Doe, in an Internet chatroom named “Romance” in early 2003.

The two spent hours on the computer “online dating” and eventually set up a meeting in April. They spent six days at a motel, having consensual sex 10 times, talking, watching television and drinking beer, prosecutors said.

The motel clerk called police after a dispute over billing for the room. Beadle was arrested on April 22 and has been in custody since then.

Beadle initially told police that the girl, reported missing by her mother, was his long-lost daughter, but later admitted to the sexual activity.

In most online sexual enticement cases, the victims live within 50 miles of the offenders, said Janis Wolak, a researcher at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Centre.

A study the centre published in November, considered the first national tally of arrests for Internet-related sex crimes against minors, found US authorities made 500 online enticement arrests in the year beginning in July 2000. Only about five percent of those cases involved international travel, she said.

But in other ways, the case is fairly typical. Most offenders are white men much older than their teenage victims who see the sex as consensual, Wolak said.

“A lot of times the victims are in love and view these as relationships,” she said.

In fact, the two “chatted about how deeply they felt for one another and how they would like to get married,” according to a statement filed by FBI special agent Thomas Reinwart.

Assistant US Attorney Clifford Cronk said the events had a negative impact on the girl “at a time when she was apparently quite impressionable.”

Her family left Fort Madison shortly after the crime and has been difficult to contact, Cronk said.

The CyberTipline, funded by Congress and run by the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia, has received 10,000 complaints about online enticement since its inception in 1998. said.