'Deplorable' Edinburgh child rapist jailed for molesting girl, 11, and little boy in past sex crimes

A convicted rapist was jailed for a further six years on Thursday after past sex crimes against children committed nearly four decades ago caught up with him.

Thomas Nelson.

Thomas Nelson abused an 11-year-old girl and carried out a serious sex act on a little boy when he was aged five or six.

Nelson, 57, a former soldier, molested the girl at an address in Tullibody and at a park in the Clackmannanshire town and at open ground in the nearby Ochil hills between November 1979 and November the following year.

The sex predator carried out a serious indecency offence against the boy in a single incident between July 1978 and the summer of the following year at a farm road outside Tullibody after taking off his lower clothes.

After jurors at the High Court in Edinburgh convicted him of two indecency offences against the children and an assault on the girl they were informed that Nelson was already in prison serving a 12-year sentence for further physical and sexual violence against other youngsters.

The court heard that Nelson had frightened victims into silence after perpetrating his crimes against them.

'Deplorable'

A judge told him: "You were a teenager at the time of these offences. You knew your actions were wrong."

Lady Wise said Nelson's previous convictions included those for "a deplorable series of offences against children."

She said he appeared to have cunningly planned and executed the abuse of the children in the late 1970s and it had a considerable impact on them.

The judge placed Nelson, a prisoner in Edinburgh, on the Sex Offenders' Register indefinitely and told him that his latest six year sentence would be served consecutively to the jail term he is currently serving.

Nelson was jailed in 2017 at the same court for a string of offences against other children, including rape and allowing a child to be raped by others.

He abused four youngsters over a decade beginning in the mid 1990s at houses in the Granton, Broomhouse and Wester Hailes areas of Edinburgh and at an address in Clackmannanshire.

During the horrifying abuse he provided a girl aged between four and six to other men so they could have sex with her and he also had intercourse with the child.

He assaulted two boys, one of whom had a gun put to his head and hot spoons applied to his skin.

Defence counsel Tim Niven-Smith told the court that following his latest convictions further imprisonment for Nelson was "inevitable", but pointed out that at the time of the crimes against the girl and boy he was a teenager.