‘How many more?’ As Rushden’s most prolific paedophile Robert Gould is jailed, his number of victims continues to rise..

It was after day one of Robert Gould’s trial at Northampton Crown Court nearly three weeks ago that the first message dropped into our reporter’s inbox.

‘He assaulted me too..’

And the messages kept coming throughout the trial. With every story, came a new victim.

‘Robert Gould ruined my life..’

They haven’t yet stopped.

It’s not unusual for more victims to feel empowered to finally speak up when they see their abusers on trial. But the magnitude of this was unusual. Every person that contacted our reporter has been urged to get in touch with Northamptonshire Police, whose meticulous investigation was the catalyst for the prosecution of former South End Juniors teacher and Methodist youth club supervisor.

His crimes finally caught up with him when a jury found him guilty of 29 counts of sexual assault, including one of rape, perpetrated during a 16 year period through the 1970s and 80s.

The scale of his offending looks set to grow to numbers not seen before on this scale in Northamptonshire. We already know of 19 – the 14 victims in this case and five from 1988. Many more have contacted our reporters.

Police say they will consider each and every allegation that is sent to them.

Most of his victims were around the age of just 10. Back then, most boys of that age had no idea what sex was, what assault was, or even what was happening to them.

But they knew it was wrong. Such was the subtlety of what he did to some of them that some didn’t consider themselves to be victims until the police knocked.

Many of the victims who appeared in the witness box could barely remember the names of the people they went to school with. Some couldn’t even remember what years they were there.

But they could very clearly remember what Gould had done to them, how he felt, his odour, how confused they felt afterwards.

One said: “It’s an embedded memory in my mind. What he looked like, how he smelt. I don’t remember much from the 1970s but I shut my eyes and it comes straight back.”

As each man walked into the witness box, they were shown a chart with the childhood faces of all 14 victims of Robert Gould.

Some of them, ashen faced, were clearly shocked at the number of little faces that stared back at them. They hadn’t been told beforehand who else had been a victim.

Witness E, his hand shaking, blurted out: “I’m upset by the number of people on this sheet to be honest.”

Two of the victims were brothers, but they had never spoken to each other about exactly what happened to them until police started investigating.

As the victims grew up they started to put the pieces together and 45 years later, boy after boy, now grown men, walked into the witness box to finally tell the world what happened to them all those years ago.

For several of them it was the first time they had spoken in detail about the offences outside of a police station.

So normalised was Gould’s behaviour that it became a running joke among people who had gone to the school.

Over the years, former pupils laughed about him, calling him ‘Gay Gould’. It was described in court as an ‘open secret’ in Rushden.

So brazen and prolific was Gould’s offending, that one witness told the court they were queuing up after games so he could ‘check their clothing’ and watched child after child in front of him being sexually assaulted, before the inevitable fate met him.

Victims will now rightly have questions about how on earth he was allowed to offend so frequently, in plain sight.

Many of his assaults took place in front of whole classes of children.

Witness G told the court how Gould had stroked the inside of his leg at chess club. He never returned to the club.

Witness L told the jury that he ‘blamed the school for allowing it to happen to him.’

One witness who told his mother in the early 1970s what had happened to him and she went into school to see the headteacher, Mr Hale.

"Nothing was done about it,” said Witness A.

How many children might not have suffered at Gould’s hands had that allegation been acted on properly by the school?

In August 1987 Gould was investigated by police after an allegation of rape by Witness N. The Chief Constable of the force where the report was made consulted the Criminal Prosecution Service in January 1988 over whether to charge Gould. They said no, because the allegations weren’t ‘corroborated’.

Witness N went on to sexually assault his siblings, with one of them ending up pregnant.

It’s not known whether the police alerted bosses at South End Juniors or at Northamptonshire Local Education Authority in 1987, but Gould continued to teach there and to assault more victims.

On February 24, 1988, he was eventually suspended after another boy made allegations.

Police interviewed his entire class, and the year above, and discovered four more victims.

Deputy headteacher Steven Szwejkowski had walked in on Gould with a boy who had his shorts down. In a statement he said he had told the headteacher Mr Hale out of concern that Gould could ‘be accused of something’.

He said, after he told the headteacher, he believed he took no action.

He gave evidence against Gould at his 1988 trial, but Gould himself told the court that Mr Szwejkowski had picked him up from prison when he was released, and that the pair had kept in touch by Christmas card over the years.

In August 1988, Gould was found guilty by a jury of indecent assaults on five boys.

Some of the victims had seen Gould in Rushden in the years since he had been convicted. One described how he felt after having to play him as an opponent at squash. He never played squash again.

One victim said he’d confronted him at a Christening where Gould, a Methodist lay preacher, gave the lesson from the pulpit.

"I approached him and asked if there was any reason why a child who had wet legs should have cream rubbed into them,” he told the court.

"He used the word ‘chafing’.

"I took pleasure in watching Gould’s friends fade away from him.”

One boy told his mum, who batted away the allegations, saying that Gould was being ‘fatherly’.

Quite how Gould was able to assault so many boys in a busy school without detection for 16 years is a mystery that is worthy of more examination. Our reporter has asked the current local education authority North Northamptonshire Council for comment. They have not done so.

Gould’s victims have met different fates in life. Some have stayed in Rushden, some have moved abroad, one has an incredibly prestigious job as a public servant.

Prosecutor Claire Howell said: “All of these different people have different personalities, their lives have taken very different paths.

"The prosecution says that each and every one of them was telling the truth.”

Although several of the men did know each other in later life, few had any long-lasting friendships, blowing apart Gould’s paper-thin defence that they had cooked up the allegations between them in order to get compensation.

In fact, the men had only been told they could be eligible for compensation by the officer in the case, Detective Constable Alice Hornsby as it became evident that the two year time limit between reporting an offence to the police and claiming grew closer. She had sought advice from the CPS before telling the victims.

In the event, the majority of the men had not pursued any compensation, with one saying in court that compensation wouldn’t change what had happened.

In court, DC Hornsby said: “Before I raised the topic, none of them asked about compensation.

"A lot of them weren’t even aware of it.”

On the stand, Gould lost his temper within minutes of the beginning of cross examination. He seemed angry that he was being asked to recall details from fifty years ago.

He had no answers when asked about the contradictions in his evidence. At one point the court had to take a break when he said he was finding it ‘very, very difficult.’

Gould was accompanied throughout the case by his wife Nita, who had also been a teacher at Newton Road Primary School in Rushden.

The pair moved to Rushden in 1972 as newly-qualified teachers and Gould spent his whole career at South End Juniors, bar a year at Warwick University in 1975. It’s not known what he has done for work in the intervening years since he served his prison term.

Nita accompanied him every day in court. They ate sandwiches in the waiting area at lunchtime and Gould did the newspaper’s puzzle page.

Police faced an uphill climb to trace some of Gould’s victims. Records were incomplete and many of the victims were only traced because classmates could remember their names.

One man made a report via the Truth Project, the independent inquiry set up to trace victims of child sexual abuse. Despite reservations about revisiting the past, he agreed for his report to be investigated by police.

No official records were kept of the classes of the youth group Gould ran, and it was only by chance that one of the boys reported the abuse that happened there against him.

There is no information available about how long Gould ran the youth club there. There could be many more victims. The Methodist Church has said that its safeguarding procedures have changed and said it would comment after sentencing.

The horror of seeing these victims, one by one, walk into the witness box and have to recall what happened to them so many years ago was Gould’s final wicked act toward them.

If he had pleaded guilty then they would not have had to relive that trauma in court.

Gould must have thought, all those years ago, that he’d got away with it. What he didn’t count on, was that these 14 little boys would one day grow into men and find their voices. Justice, however slowly its wheels have turned, has finally caught up with him.