A former Inverness prison officer is facing jail after been found guilty of sexually abusing a girl in the early 1980s.
Melvin Walker, 78, had denied using lewd, indecent and libidinous practices towards the child, who was aged between 12 and 16, as well as indecent assault.
The charges relate to incidents between 1980 and 1984, during which time the former RAF serviceman Walker worked as a prison guard at HMP Inverness.
Walker’s victim gave evidence during his trial at Inverness Sheriff Court and told the jury how he began to target her when she was 12 or 13.
Abuser’s demeanour ‘suddenly changed’
In evidence led by fiscal depute David Morton, she said the abuse started when they were playfighting but Walker’s demeanour suddenly “changed” and she felt that he was aroused.
She said: “I wasn’t quite sure what happened because at that age I had no idea about sex.”
The woman said that after a number of incidents the abuse “escalated” and Walker later exposed himself to her and induced her to touch him intimately. He also asked her to lie down and abused her while “spooning” her.
She said the abuse left her confused, adding: “We weren’t sexualised back then, we were still very naive.”
The woman detailed how the behaviour ended after Walker attempted to force her to perform a sex act on him, which she refused.
He persisted, but afterwards told her: “That is it, no more.”
‘I was scared. He was a big man’
Asked how the incidents had made her feel, she said: “I was confused. I was scared. He was a heavyweight boxer, he was a big man.”
The complainer said that in her youth she had begun to smoke and drink “heavily” and had turned to self-harm in an attempt to cope with her feelings about what had happened.
As a young adult she said she had been driven to the brink of suicide by the memories of the sexual abuse.
The court was told the woman confronted her abuser on more than one occasion in the intervening years.
A recording of one such confrontation, in 2016, was played for the jury. In it, she spoke of the “horror” of the abuse and told him: “You realise there is no forgiveness for what you did?”
Abuse survivor: ‘Time does not heal’
She said: “Time does not heal this sort of stuff, it doesn’t.”
Walker was heard apologising repeatedly in the recording – but when he took to the stand in his own defence he denied he had been saying sorry for the abuse.
Under cross-examination Walker repeatedly responded “it didn’t happen” when the incidents the woman described were put to him.
Asked if she and a second witness, who told the court Walker had previously admitted the abuse to her, were lying, he said they were “mistaken”.
But a jury took only around two hours to reject his version of events, returning unanimous guilty verdicts on both charges.
Sheriff Sara Matheson placed Walker, of Deerfield Road, March, Cambridgeshire, on the sex offenders’ register with immediate effect.
She deferred sentence until next month to allow for the preparation of pre-sentencing reports.
Following representations from defence advocate Bill Adam, Sheriff Matheson allowed Walker’s bail to continue until then, but warned him: “You should read nothing into that in relation to final disposal.”