A 49-YEAR-OLD who was jailed for sexually abusing children as a youth has seen his sentenced increased after a fresh victim came forward.
John Moss was jailed for seven years in 2011 after admitting that he abused five children over a period of 14 years.
Derby Crown Court was told this week that Moss had successfully seen his sentence reduced to four-and-a-half years at the Court of Appeal and was due to be released this July.
But Christopher Dean, prosecuting, told the court that a new victim came forward to the police last summer.
The man told officers he was indecently assaulted in a field in South Normanton in the late 1970s when he 10 and Moss was 15.
Moss, formerly of Garden Crescent, South Normanton, pleaded guilty to the new offence.
Judge Jonathan Gosling handed him a 12-month sentence which would run concurrently with his existing one. The judge told Moss that the new sentence would add "a few weeks" to the time he had left to serve.
Judge Gosling said: "You could have confessed in 2011 to the additional offence but you did not.
"On the other hand, he (the victim) had to live with the torment over what happened to him and the anguish of coming forward thinking it might affect his job which, of course, it could not as he can never be recognised as being the victim."
In 2011, Moss admitted abusing three girls and two boys, aged between five and nine.
At that hearing Derby Crown Court was told that, for the previous 19 years, Moss had been a reformed man – meeting his long-term partner, with whom he had children – and had not committed any abuse.
But, between 1979 and 1993, as a teenager and young man, he spent years indecently assaulting children.
Mr Dean, talking at the new hearing this week, said: "The new victim came forward last summer.
"At first he did not want to say anything and it had been boxed up in the back of his mind.
"But he was talked into going to the police where he told them about an incident that happened in a field.
"In his victim impact statement, he told how he suffered a nervous breakdown as an adult and looking back now he wondered whether this was as a result of what happened to him."
Police visited Moss in prison, where he was arrested and questioned over the fresh allegation, telling detectives the new victim may have come forward "for financial gain".
Mark Watson, in mitigation for Moss, said that the new indecent assault offence dated back to when his client was in his mid-teens.
He said: "This is a matter that goes back many, many years when the complainant was young and the defendant was young himself.
"They were known to each other and played together building dens, nests and rope swings in the woods."
