Two children and a schoolgirl were raped by a convicted Cornwall paedophile, who thankfully died in prison. 69-year-old Patrick Mugford was 18 months into a seven-year sentence when he died at HMP Littlehey in Cambridgeshire.
Following an attack and rape of a Canterbury schoolgirl two decades ago, Mugford was imprisoned in May 2022. The girl reported the attack right away at the time, but she was not believed by her foul mother and had to go through two decades of suffering and damage before a jury found her perpetrator guilty.
Maidstone Crown Court in May 2022 found the pervert, who had been lodging in the Illogan area at the time of his arrest, guilty of rape.
The court then heard how his victim, left so scarred by the incident, ended up drinking three litres of cider a day “to black everything out” while partly living on the streets. Originally not believed by her mother, the teenage girl reported her attacker to the authorities in 2019 after reading another court report regarding her attacker’s offences.
Mugford was found guilty in 2012 for sexually abusing two minors, but it was only in 2019 that the adolescent he had attacked and raped twenty years earlier reported the attack after learning of his convictions. For the rape and indecent assault, he was imprisoned for seven-and-a-half years.
An investigation into his death in prison found that the 69-year-old passed in a hospital from aspiration pneumonia, an infection brought on by breathing food or liquids into the lungs. This was brought on by bilateral multiple cerebral infarctions, or strokes on both sides of the brain, which result from disturbed blood flow and, in Mugford’s case, starting from his Type 2 diabetes.
“The clinical reviewer concluded that the clinical care Mr Mugford received at HMP Littlehey was of a good standard and was at least equivalent to that which Mr Mugford could have expected to receive in the community,” Adrian Usher, Prisons and Probation Ombudsman said. Her medical records revealed that staff members answered Mr Mugford’s healthcare needs with the necessary responsiveness and initiative. The PPO investigator looked at non-clinical aspects of Mr Mugford’s treatment.”
He further said: “We did not uncover any relevant non-clinical concerns. We do not offer any suggestions.” A coroner decided Mugford passed from natural causes.