After nearly three decades of evading justice, a former school housemaster and Scout leader who fled the UK to escape prosecution for child sex crimes has finally been jailed.
Richard Burrows, 81, has been sentenced to 46 years in prison for sexually abusing 24 young boys across three counties—Cheshire, the West Midlands, and West Mercia—between 1968 and 1995.
While his victims carried the trauma of his abuse for decades, Burrows spent 27 years under a false identity abroad, boasting in emails about “living in paradise” in Thailand since 1997.
Burrows’s sickening crimes began in the late 1960s. He targeted vulnerable children entrusted to his care—boys in children’s homes and Scout groups—exploiting his trusted roles as a housemaster and leader.
In Cheshire, he worked at Danesford Children’s Home in Congleton between 1969 and 1971. Elsewhere, he preyed on boys through local Scout groups up to 1995.
The court heard shocking details of the abuse. Victims described long-term emotional damage, the lasting effects evident even today.
In 1997, Burrows was charged with historic child sex offences. He was bailed but failed to attend a scheduled plea hearing at Chester Crown Court that December.
He vanished without a trace. Despite multiple police appeals and four televised Crimewatch broadcasts, Burrows managed to stay hidden.
Behind the scenes, he had assumed a new identity—stealing the name of a terminally ill acquaintance—and secured a genuine passport to slip out of the UK undetected.
His luck finally ran out in April 2023. Cheshire Police’s serious and organised crime unit deployed cutting-edge image recognition software to scour the internet. Billions of images were analysed. Eventually, they found a match.
The man calling himself Peter Smith was living in Chalong, Phuket. He had been active in sailing circles and even featured in a local news story in 2019, upon his retirement from an advertising job.
Officers discovered that “Smith” was indeed Burrows. Plans to extradite him were underway when, in a twist, he returned to the UK voluntarily, short of cash and battling cancer. He landed at Heathrow in March last year and was arrested immediately.
Burrows now faces justice. Last month, a jury at Chester Crown Court found him guilty of 54 charges, including indecent assault, buggery, attempted buggery and indecency with a child.
He had already pleaded guilty to 43 other offences, including making and possessing indecent images of children, and possessing false identity documents with intent.
Detective Superintendent Sarah Pengelly of Cheshire Police said the case “shows the lengths abusers will go to avoid being held accountable,” but praised the team’s persistence and new technology that brought Burrows down.
“Thanks to the tireless work of our officers and the bravery of the victims who came forward, he’s finally behind bars where he belongs,” she said.
Justice has caught up with Richard Burrows. His years of freedom, spent in luxury under a stolen name, are over. For the survivors of his abuse, this sentence brings long-overdue closure—and the end of a fugitive’s paradise.
