Sick girls used as objects in 'the most heinous way', judge tells court

The judge in the case of ex-children's doctor Michael Salmon, said he was cold and calculating in the way in sexually abused sick girls.

The former consultant paediatrician may die in prison after a judge sentenced him to serve at least nine years behind bars for historic attacks on six teenage patients in the 1980s.

He was convicted at Reading Crown Court last Friday of indecently assaulting girls at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and raping a teenager at his home. It was the second time he had been found guilty of abusing patients.

Dr Salmon brazenly attacked young patients in his consulting room, often behind a screen while his victims' parents were still in the room. The doctor carried out unnecessary internal examinations, said by the prosecution to be for his own sexual "kicks."

Salmon was also found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl in his bedroom after she had gone to him for medical help, telling her "one favour deserves another."

A jury found the doctor guilty of nine indecent assaults and two rapes carried out against six girls aged 12 to 18 years, between 1980 and 1988, after a month-long trial.

Sentencing him to 18 years behind bars, Judge Johanna Cutts QC said Salmon was a predatory paedophile who had showed "significant planning" and a "gross breach of trust" in his grooming and abuse of young patients.

He would engineer situations where he would be alone with young girls, to have sexual conversations and touch them inappropriately, she told the court.

Salmon, looking pale and drawn after six nights on remand in prison, looked on blankly as he was given an 18-year jail term.

Several of his victims, including the woman who was raped, wept in the packed public gallery in court as they saw their abuser jailed.

Sentencing him under the 1956 legislation relevant at the time of the offending, the judge told Salmon that if she was following modern sentencing guidelines, he would be facing a life sentence.