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A former boarding school housemaster and scout leader has been convicted of nearly 100 offences, including dozens of child abuse charges, nearly 30 years after he fled to Thailand.
Richard Burrows, 80, was found guilty of abusing boys between the late 1960s and mid-1990s while working at a school in Cheshire and later as a scout leader in the West Midlands.
Burrows spent nearly three decades on the run after fleeing to Thailand shortly before he was due to appear in court in 1997.
He was arrested at Heathrow on 28 March last year after he ran out of money and returned to the UK, where he was charged with more than 100 offences spanning nearly 30 years.
Appearing at Chester crown court, Burrows admitted 43 of the 105 charges but denied the remaining counts.
A court official confirmed on Monday that Burrows had been found guilty of 54 counts including indecency with a child, indecent assault and an offence type now regarded as rape.
He was found not guilty upon the direction of the judge of one count of indecent assault and the prosecution offered no evidence on a number of others. In total, he was convicted of 97 offences. He will be sentenced on 7 April.
The jury heard that Burrows systematically abused boys with whom he came into contact.
Mark Connor KC, prosecuting, said: “He obtained positions of trust and responsibility which he breached to satisfy himself sexually with the youngsters.”
Burrows had worked as a housemaster at a school for troubled teenagers in Cheshire in the 1960s. He was later involved with the scouts and amateur radio clubs in the Midlands.
During his trial, Burrows admitted being a paedophile but denied the more serious allegations, describing them as “degrading and disgusting”.
DI Eleanor Atkinson, of Cheshire constabulary, said Burrows was a “prolific sex offender” who had shown no remorse for his actions.
In one email found by police, the former scout leader wrote that he had spent three decades “living in paradise” while on the run in Thailand.
He was eventually tracked down in 2023 by officers who used specialist facial recognition software to locate him in Chalong, Phuket.
Detectives found that Burrows had been living under the name Peter Smith, a terminally ill acquaintance whose identity he had stolen in order to obtain a bogus passport and flee the country while on police bail in 1997.
DI Atkinson said: “While his victims will never be able to forget what happened to them, I hope that the fact that Burrows has now been held accountable will finally provide them with some closure. Sadly, four of his victims have now passed away and so did not get to see justice served.”
Samantha Thompson, a specialist prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, described Burrows as a “an unrepentant paedophile” who used his position of trust to sexually abuse boys over three decades.
She said: “His victims suffered horrendous abuse made worse by many of them not being able to tell anyone for fear that they would not be believed. This was borne out in some cases, where boys did speak up but were dismissed, and Burrows was able to move on.”
Burrows, who previously lived in Birmingham, was asked by the prosecution why he had gone on the run and relocated to Thailand for several years.
Giving evidence, he said this was because “the number of charges weren’t me – I hadn’t done them”, and that he had chosen Thailand because he could go sailing. He said he wanted to come home after 27 years because he had run out of money.
