The sons of a woman who stabbed to death a paedophile who abused them say they are glad she stopped him targeting other children.
Sarah Sands killed Michael Pleasted in 2014, weeks after discovering he had betrayed her friendship to abuse her three boys.
When she befriended him, she and her other neighbours had no idea he was a paedophile who had changed his identity. Pleasted, 77, had 24 previous convictions for sex offences over three decades and had served time in prison for his crimes.
After discovering the abuse, Ms Sands knifed Pleasted eight times, in a “determined and sustained attack”, that left him bleeding to death, and later handed herself into police.
Now, after serving nearly four years in jail, she is spearheading a campaign for tighter restrictions on sex offenders who change their names.
Labour MP Sarah Champion said some sex offenders are using their new identities to get through criminal records checks.
Twin brothers Alfie and Reece, who were 11 when their mother killed Pleasted, told BBC News that he could have targeted other children had he not been stopped and they were glad he was dead.
“If he’d been locked away I’m sure that would have been just as satisfying but he wasn’t,” said Alfie.
The twins and their brother Bradley, a year older, waived their right to anonymity to speak out.
The boys had Saturday jobs at the newsagent where Pleasted worked in Silvertown, east London.
DCI Perry Benton of the Metropolitan Police said Ms Sands had welcomed him into the family. “He was to all intents and purposes grooming the children,” he said.
While awaiting trial for sexually abusing the boys, Pleasted was granted bail and allowed back home, close to the family.
“There are no words to describe how it eats you up from the inside,” their mother said.
“I’m never going to be able to take it away from them when they’re screaming in the night … He was a walking nightmare.
“It’s horrendous: the guilt, the pain, the sheer shame. It’s my job to protect them. I should have known. It eats you alive.”
In November 2014, she went to his flat, carrying a knife.
“I was absolutely petrified. He was not remorseful in any way,” she said.
She said she wanted to ask him to plead guilty and spare her boys the ordeal of facing court.
“I didn’t know what I was doing there,” she said. “I realised I had made a huge mistake. He said ‘your children are lying’. The whole world froze. I had the knife in my left hand and I remember he tried to grab it.” She maintains she did not intend to kill Pleasted.
Ms Sands was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds she had lost control. She was jailed for three-and-a-half years - a sentence that was later increased to seven-and-a-half years. Court of Appeal judges said she had done nothing to help Pleasted after the attack as she did not call emergency services.
She said she was suicidal in Holloway prison but rang her sons daily.
“I bring life into the world. It never occurred to me I’d be guilty of taking life,” she told the BBC in a documentary, Killing My Children’s Abuser.
The boys, who lived with their grandmother while their mother was behind bars, said growing up with her in prison was hard, visiting her just once a month - but they agree with what she did.
“I thought, hats off,” Bradley, now 20, said. “I’m not going to deny it.”
“It did make us feel safer,” Alfie, 19, added. “It didn’t slow down the nightmares. But it did give us a sense of security because you didn’t have to walk down the street thinking he was going to come around the corner.”
“He lived literally across the road from us,” Bradley added. “I could open that window over there,” he said pointing, “and I’d see his house”.
Reece said it was “nice knowing that he was dead”. But he added: “It didn’t stop any afterthoughts, you know, we would often wake up crying [saying] ‘where’s Mum?’“
Ms Sands recalled of Pleasted: “I thought he was a lovely old man. I cooked for him, looked after him, always kept him company when I had the time.”
He invited the three boys back to his home, where he carried out the assaults.
The three men said they have rebuilt their relationship with their mother.
“She did try to baby us,” said Reece. “It was nice but it just makes you realise all those years that were lost.”
The court heard that Pleasted had changed his name from Robin Moult and had previous sex-offending convictions. But nobody in the area, including the local council that housed him, knew about his past.
Ms Champion said new background – or DBS – checks allow people who have changed their identities to go into schools and other places with children and vulnerable people and exploit their positions of trust “in the most horrific ways”.
If police marked offenders’ passports and driving licences they could later be identified, Ms Champion told Radio 4’s Today programme.
A Home Office spokesperson said it had reviewed the issue, but it could not publish its findings because they contained sensitive information, which could potentially be used by offenders to exploit the system.
It said the UK had some of the toughest powers in the world to deal with sex offenders living in the community.
Ms Sands said when she was jailed she was very bitter towards the judge and authorities.
Now she puts her energy into supporting her sons and her new campaign. “Paedophilia is a pandemic and we must achieve change,” she said.
