Under-age sex trial: The 'pathetic and desperate' lies of shamed Giles Cross

Jan 20 2011 by Naomi Dunning, Chester Chronicle

TARPORLEY businessman Giles Cross was jailed for four years after using social networking and chat sites to coerce a teenager into a relationship with him.

The 45-year-old met his 15-year-old victim at a stables in Delamere where he went with his girlfriend.

He befriended the girl in November, 2008 and talked to her about his extravagant lifestyle, his business and his polo club membership.

In reality, however, business was average and Cross lived with his parents in a modest semi-detached house in Winsford and had few true friends of his own.

Despite forensic DNA evidence of sexual activity and hundreds of pages of evidence showing their intimate and sexual conversations, as well as thousands of photographs of the victim he had taken via a webcam without her knowledge, he denied the charges and said their relationship was merely a platonic friendship.

The court heard Cross started communicating with the girl using mobile phones and via the internet on MSN messenger, Skype video messaging and Facebook.

Prosecuting, Simon Mills revealed to the court that the pair had saved each other’s mobile phone numbers under pet names to avoid detection. The 15-year-old had saved him as ‘Beau’ and he had saved her as ‘Belle’.

As the relationship progressed, Cross would contact the girl hundreds of times a day and their conversations would get progressively more intimate and sexual in nature. He would frequently tell her he loved her, and during these internet conversations he would tell her ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you’ and that ‘I have never been happier with some one’.

They talked of holidays to Sharm El Sheikh and Cross had referred during these conversations to the date of her 16th birthday when she would reach the age of consent. By January, 2009, the pair were frequently talking over the internet until the early hours of the morning.

At this point. the pair started meeting up and would sometimes walk around her estate for up to two hours. The girl would tell her parents she was meeting friends or taking the dog for a walk.

By the weekend of January 16, 2009, Cross had starting taking the girl back to his business premises, where the sexual activity occurred.

Cross told the police and the court that he was helping the girl with her problems and supporting her emotionally.

During his defence he told the court the girl’s father had confronted him with a knife, which the father denies.

Cross dismissed forensic DNA evidence of sexual activity on two cushions from his office as being due to a ‘lesbian affair’ the girl had with a friend in his car while sitting on the cushions.

Prosecutor Simon Mills told the court: “This was a pathetic and desperate attempt to excuse away this evidence.”

Sentencing Cross, Judge Nicholas Woodward told him two aggravating features of his conduct were that he forced a vulnerable teenager to tell the court in detail of their relationship and that he made ‘baseless allegations‘ against the girl’s father and her friend during his defence.