A “despicable” 81-year-old former scout leader has been jailed for 46 years for sexually abusing scores of young boys before going on the run for nearly three decades.
Richard Burrows, an ex-school housemaster, was convicted earlier this year of 97 offences against 24 children between 1968 and 1995.
Burrows spent nearly 27 years at large after fleeing to Thailand shortly before he was due to appear in court in 1997.
He was arrested at Heathrow on 28 March last year after he ran out of money and returned to the UK, where he was charged with abusing boys across Cheshire, West Midlands and West Mercia.
Elise Carnot, a solicitor at the law firm Bolt Burdon Kemp, who represented one of Burrows’ victims, said she had no doubt that the nearly 100 offences were “just the tip of the iceberg” of his crimes.
“I hope many more people now feel able to come forward, confident they will be able to access justice,” she said.
Sentencing Burrows to 46 years in prison on Wednesday, judge Steven Everett described the defendant as a “despicable man” who had “ruined countless lives”.
Everett, sitting at Chester crown court, said Burrows “would not be released” and that it was “one of the most, if not the most serious” case of its kind he had dealt with as a judge.
Burrows had worked as a housemaster at a school for troubled teenagers in Cheshire in the 1960s. He was later involved with the scouts and amateur radio clubs in the Midlands.
During his trial, Burrows admitted being a paedophile but denied the more serious allegations, describing them as “degrading and disgusting”.
In one email found by police, the former scout leader wrote that he had spent three decades “living in paradise” while on the run in Thailand.
He was eventually tracked down in 2023 by officers who used specialist facial recognition software to locate him in Chalong, Phuket.
He had been charged with a number of historical sex offences and was bailed but failed to attend a plea hearing at Chester Crown Court in December 1997.
Detectives found that Burrows had been living under the name Peter Smith, a terminally ill acquaintance whose identity he had stolen in order to obtain a bogus passport and flee the country while on police bail in 1997.
Attempts to locate him included several police appeals and four Crimewatch appeals on national television.
Detective Inspector Eleanor Atkinson, who led the Cheshire constabulary investigation, praised the bravery and courage of the victims and said: “Burrows is a coward, he knew he was guilty in 1997, but rather than face the consequences of his actions, he fled the country after fraudulently obtaining a passport using the identity of an unwell man.
“He spent the last 27 years, in his own words, ‘living in paradise’. It is clear that he did not spare a thought for his victims, who were trying to live their lives under the shadow of the abuse they had suffered.”
