A child rapist who subjected a girl to a catalogue of sexual abuse, including molesting her in a north hospital, was jailed for eight years yesterday.
Andrew Temple, 53, preyed on the victim from the age of eight.
Temple, formerly of Loanhead in Midlothian, had earlier denied a string of charges during a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh.
But a jury convicted him of the seven offences he faced, including two charges of rape and three of indecent behaviour towards the girl, and two further offences of indecency against two young boys.
Judge Robert Weir QC said the offences of which Temple was convicted, particularly those against the girl, were “plainly very serious”.
He told Temple that as a result of the jail sentence he was imposing, he would remain on the sex offenders’ register indefinitely.
Temple’s offending against the girl took place from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s at addresses in Midlothian and the Highlands – including at Fort William’s Belford Hospital, where the victim was being treated. The boys were targets for his abuse in the mid to late 1990s.
The female victim first spoke to police in 2003, then again in 2010 and finally in 2014, which eventually led to Temple being charged.
At one stage she handed a letter to officers in which she detailed some of the abuse that she suffered at the hands of Temple.
She wrote: “He started touching me, getting me to do things to him and having full sex with him.”
She said she remembered Temple offering her cider and she drank glass after glass until she was feeling “funny and sick”.
She recalled him pulling down her trousers and raping her. She said it hurt her and she wanted him to stop but he did not.
Afterwards Temple returned and asked her if she liked it and she told him “yes” because she felt really frightened. He told her not to tell anyone about it.
Defence solicitor advocate Chris Fyffe told the court that Temple continued to maintain his innocence, but realised that a custodial sentence was inevitable because of the seriousness of the convictions.
Mr Fyffe said: “He was not the person he is now and that was as a result of his alcoholism.”