A CONVICTED paedophile's girlfriend who sent an anonymous letter to his young victim telling her 'You have heard of Karma - what goes around comes around', has been jailed.

Alison Souter, manager of the award-winning tearoom at the Black Swan Hotel, in Helmsley, wrote the letter in "a desperate last throw of the dice" to persuade his victim to change her story and clear Neil Swales.

York Crown Court heard sexual predator Swales, 56, of Great Edstone, near Kirkbymoorside, had last May been jailed for eight years for four offences of sexual abuse of a girl then seven or eight years old.

His trial heard he had put his hands round her throat and made threats about her future to make her keep silent about what he was doing to her.

After a jury convicted him and before he was sentenced, 52-year-old Souter sent the letter to the girl telling her that her “lies” would mean she would never know peace, said Chloe Fairley, prosecuting.

Souter discussed the letter with relatives, got another woman to write the address on the envelope and posted it away from her then home in Great Edstone, overlooked by the North York Moors, to hide her identity.

“A lie is a lie is a lie and will always be a lie and the truth will always be the truth,” she wrote. “Only you and God and his angels know the truth and they only want what is best for you.

“You have heard of Karma - what goes around comes around. You may be known as the girl who ruined an innocent man’s life.”

She also attacked the police investigation against Swales.

Although the girl’s mother managed to intercept the letter before she had read more than the first line, it still had such a traumatic effect on the girl, now a teenager, that she no longer feels safe in her own home and is taking counselling.

Honorary Recorder of York, Judge Paul Batty QC jailed Souter, admitted sending an offensive letter, for 12 months.

said: “This was a premeditated course of conduct intended to try to persuade a vulnerable victim of sexual abuse to change her account and thus achieve for her partner a reversal of the verdicts that had been returned by this court.”

He said Souter had put “extreme pressure” on the girl.

“Anyone who in these circumstances seeks to suborn a witness in the way you did by the writing of this letter can only expect a custodial sentence.”

Reginald Bosomworth, mitigating, said she now fully accepted Swales was a paedophile and had thrown everything to do with him out of her life.

But at the time of his trial, she had believed him to be innocent.

“It was a desperate last throw of the dice,” Mr Bosomworth said.

In a letter to magistrates for her first court appearance passed to the judge, Souter wrote: “I am not a malicious or a vindictive person. I apologise unreservedly for my actions. I will never do anything like this again.”

Mr Bosomworth said during the police investigation and trial she had bottled everything up inside her and not sought help as she should have done. But when she did speak out after sending the letter, which she had immediately regretted, she had got help from her family and others.

After the case, Fiona Richards, NSPCC head of region for Yorkshire, said it offered a service for partners of paedophiles and helped them come to terms with the danger posed by the sex offenders close to them.

“Alison Souter’s actions would have added to the trauma of this young girl, prolonging her ordeal and potentially delaying her recovery. But she herself was manipulated by Swales, as so many others would have been.”

Sex offenders rely on trust and the willingness of those close to them to support them, she said.

“So we can perhaps understand the struggle Alison Souter faced,” she said.