A FORMER RAF corporal and scout leader accused of molesting a boy during a camping trip to the Lake District has gone on trial.
It is alleged that Richard William Philpotts, 63, sexually abused the male in the Windermere area during the early 1990s. Philpotts denies two alleged indecent assaults on the boy, and also a further two charges which allege a further sexual offence and an attempted sex crime.
Philpotts has gone on trial at Carlisle Crown Court where today (MON), lawyer David Phillips opened the case for the prosecution.
Mr Phillips said Philpotts, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was an RAF corporal based in Germany. During that period he was also a scout leader. It was alleged that he indecently assaulted the boy on foreign soil several times.
“We say on these occasions the defendant targeted (the boy) with attention and favours through the scouts with the intention of creating a relationship where he could exploit the boy to satisfy his own sexual desires,” said Mr Phillips.
It was during a later camping trip in the Windermere area that Philpotts, of Gainsborough Road, Stowmarket, Suffolk, allegedly sexually abused the boy again while the pair were in a tent.
“The key issue” in the case of alleged Lakes criminal conduct, Mr Phillips told jurors, was: “Did it happen?”
“The defendant says nothing happened,” Mr Phillips explains. “(That) there was no conduct of that type whatsoever.”
The trial continues.
