Man who pushed boy, 10, off cliff for trying to stop him raping sister jailed for life
Day trippers told police they heard a shriek before seeing a small shape plummet to the concrete walkway below.
A paedophile has been jailed for 19-and-a-half years after he threw a 10-year-old boy off a 100 ft cliff for trying to stop him raping his sister.
Anthony Stocks, 54, lured the youngster to a cliff in Ovingdean, Brighton September 2022, before pushing him off, which miraculously he managed to survive.
Day trippers told police they heard a shriek before seeing a small shape plummet to the concrete walkway below.
Stocks previously told the 12-year-old girl he was sexually abusing he wanted to ‘get rid of [the boy] so we can be together’.
Speaking to detectives after spending months in hospital, the boy revealed he ‘knew everything’ about his sister’s ordeal at Stocks’s hands.
Stocks, of Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, was found guilty of attempted murder, four counts of sexually assaulting a girl under 13, causing a girl under 13 to engage in sexual activity and rape of a girl under 13 at a trial in June.
In his interview, the boy described growing suspicious of Stocks’s behaviour after seeing him kiss the girl on the lips before they went behind the bush in a park where children were playing.
The boy said: ‘Every time my sister went somewhere, he would follow. Then she told me that he asked her to have sex with him. It was happening pretty much every day.
‘I felt very sad for her. I didn’t know what to do at the time.
‘I don’t think he knew that I knew everything. But he was disappointed, and he kept sighing every time I was there – because nothing would happen.’
Oxford Crown court heard Stocks previously took the boy to a quarry in Oxfordshire where he ‘contemplated’ pushing the boy off cliffs there before changing his mind.
The girl tried in vain to warn her brother not to be alone with her abuser.
She said the older man had told her a few days before the near fatal attack: ‘I’m going to push him off a cliff. I want to get rid of him so we can be together.’
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told police: ‘I told him not to go to London because I knew that he (Stocks) was going to push him off a cliff.
‘But he (the brother) said: “No, I want to go to London”.’
Detective Sergeant Rachel Jackson said: ‘This is without a doubt one of the worst cases of child abuse that I have investigated.
‘These were absolutely horrific and evil offences committed by Anthony Stocks.
‘Over a period of around three years, Stocks had subjected the girl to sexual abuse and rape, and when the boy became aware of what was happening, Stocks hatched his evil plan to kill him.’
She added: ‘Stocks had intended to kill the boy to get him out of the way so he could continue his offending against the girl. This failed, and Stocks was arrested.
‘He is a very dangerous individual, who had no thought about anybody but himself, to protect himself from prosecution by removing the boy from the equation.
‘He has not shown any remorse throughout the course of this investigation.
‘I would like to praise both victims for their unbelievable courage and resolve that helped us to bring Stocks to justice.’
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