A former monk jailed for serial historic child sex offences, died of natural causes, it has been revealed.
Peter Turner, previously known as Father Gregory Carroll, was jailed for 20 years and 10 months in 2020 for his crimes in Workington and North Yorkshire, which happened between 1984 and 1990.
A new report published this week that his death, at HMP Swaleside on February 6 this year, was of natural causes. He was 85.
One of the victims was a pupil at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire between 1984 and 1987. He was aged 10 when the sexual abuse began.
The other two boys were abused in the Workington area between 1987 and 1990 when the defendant was serving as a parish priest.
They were aged between nine and 12 and were subjected to indecent assaults and gross indecency on a nearby beach and in Turner’s car.
North Yorkshire Police’s Non-Recent Abuse Investigation Team began a new investigation into Peter Turner in 2018 when the victim from Ampleforth College came forward to make a complaint.
He was already well-known to the police, albeit as Father Gregory Carroll, after being convicted of non-recent child abuse in 2005 relating to his time as a monk at Ampleforth College and Abbey.
Following an extensive investigation led by Detective Sergeant Graeme Bevington, which included revisiting allegations that first surfaced in Cumbria in 2006 but did not lead to any prosecutions, Turner was charged with more than 20 offences in March 2019.
A report by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman launched an independent investigation into his death. It investigates every death in a prison automatically.
It concluded that the care he received in prison was of a good standard and equivalent to that which he could have expected to receive in the community.
An inquest into his death was held on October 24 and the coroner concluded he died of natural causes, of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.
