Woman finds out her husband is a paedophile

Peter Yates and his wife, 54 –year-old Michelle Baxter, were celebrating their crystal wedding anniversary in December 2014 when police knocked at their door.

Baxter already had her suspicions about her husband's past, but at the time she believed he was innocent.

The Daily Mail reports that a court was told how, throughout the 1980s and 90s, Yates lured young girls to his home with sweets and abused them.

When the couple, who first got together, Yates told Baxter he’d been tried for sexual abuse of minors, but he was acquitted.

Peter told me he´d been accused of being a paedophile in the 1990s.

He said his second wife, who has now died, had family who were making up tales to get money for the house.

But he was charming and lovely to me, so I believed him that the vicious rumours weren´t true.

But Baxter said her suspicions eventually started to grow. She had never been introduced her to Yates's family, and he said he just didn’t get on with them. The truth was that his family believed he was guilty of the previous crimes he was tried for in 1995.

The police interviewed Yates in December 2014, and again in March 2015, before arresting him in June that year.

Yates maintained his innocence, but was found guilty of all 36 counts of child sex offences and jailed for 25 years.

Baxter said she had been duped, and was “groomed” by Yates, who she says was the “perfect gentleman” to her family.

Baxter added:

I was in denial. I thought to myself: `No I haven´t married a paedophile, you would have known´.

You don´t know, though, because they don´t just groom the children they groom everybody around them.

I don´t think he ever loved me, but I´m not bothered about it, because I wouldn´t want a paedophile to love me.

She concluded:

I just hope and pray those poor young girls, women now, can try and be happy as well - that´s all I wish for.

Ht PA

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