A ’manipulative’ child abuser from Widecombe-in-the-Moor who devised a role-play game in which he pretended to be a kidnapper has been jailed for 12 years.

Gary Tomlinson groomed a girl for abuse from the age of five by using tickling games, and then moved on to inventing scenarios in which she had to pretend to be an older girl or an adult woman.

He staged mock kidnaps in which he pretended to grab her and hold her captive but these were a pretext for more abuse.

Tomlinson claimed he had been framed by the victim’s family, whom he compared to the notorious Manson family which carried out a series of murders in America in the 1960s.

He denied abusing the girl during the 1990s but was found guilty by a jury at Exeter Crown Court last month.

Tomlinson, aged 56, was convicted of seven counts of indecent assault and four of indecency with a child.

He was jailed for a total of 12 years, ordered to pay £3,500 costs and put on the sex offenders’ register for life by Recorder Mr Malcolm Galloway. 

He told him: ‘There is clear evidence of grooming. You used role-play as part of the abuse, requiring her to play an old lady or a young girl and pretending to grab them off the street to assault them.

‘You are a controlling, manipulative, and violent man. There is no suggestion you needed to use physical threats to carry out these assaults. Her trust and confusion were enough you to abuse her.

‘I have read the victim’s personal statement and she feels entirely robbed of her childhood. She says she felt terrified and desperately unhappy. She still suffers from anxiety and flashbacks and has been told by a counsellor she may have post traumatic stress disorder.’

He ordered costs after reading in a pre-sentence report that Tomlinson, who worked in a factory, told a probation officer he was a multimillionaire.

During the trial the jury heard how Tomlinson started touching the girl from the age of five and carried on until she was about nine.

The abuse started with a tickling game but became more serious and he made her touch him sexually. He carried out the offences while babysitting the girl at various addresses in South Devon.

She told her mother at the time but a decision was made by her and her family not to go to the police. The victim herself only summoned the courage to go to the police in 2015.

Tomlinson told the jury the allegations were untrue and ridiculous. In police interviews he claimed the complainant had been put up to it by her family as part of a long-standing grudge against him.

He told officers he thought the family, from South Devon, were like the Manson Family, the hippy group which murdered Sharon Tate in 1969.

Mr Ali Rafati, defending, said this was the only offending in an otherwise blameless life. He is the main carer for his elderly mother.