March 2004 Truck driver jailed for luring teenager A 38-YEAR-OLD truck driver who got to know a Radcliffe schoolgirl on the internet and then took her to hotel rooms for sex, has been jailed for a year. Robert Boles travelled more than 200 miles to meet the 15-year-old girl at a Metrolink station near her Radcliffe home. He made the journey from just outside London three times in a month – each time meeting the youngster on a Saturday afternoon and taking her to a nearby hotel to drink alcohol and have sex. Boles was arrested after he met the teenager for a fourth time at Whitefield Metrolink station on January 24 and took her to his house in Enfield, Middlesex. Her parents reported her missing and Bury police found Bole’s address in the girl’s diary. Officers called at his house on January 27 and found the pair together. They also found video tapes containing indecent images of the girl. Boles had claimed the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had told him she was 16. But a judge at Bolton Crown Court sentenced him to a year in prison and ordered him to sign the sex offenders’ register for 10 years after over-ruling a recommendation that he should get a community penalty. Boles had earlier admitted five counts of having unlawful intercourse with the girl and to taking indecent photographs and abduction. The court heard he met the girl in an internet chat room in March last year and they began contacting each other by email, telephone and text messages. Henry Blackshaw, defending, said unmarried Boles used the internet regularly to meet women and felt “guilty and full of remorse” after discovering the girl’s real age. Mr Blackshaw said: “She has said she told people when she was 14 that she was 15 and when she was 15 that she was 16 in quite a considered and calculated way, she had a habit of deceiving about her age.” He also claimed the girl had earlier sent an indecent photograph to Boles. Judge Hope Derwent told Boles: “You say she told you she was 16 but as a man of 38, you know girls are not always honest about their ages and the law is there to protect girls under 15 against their own vulnerability.” He sentenced Boles to nine months for each count of unlawful sex and three months for the photographs. He was also given 12 months for child abduction, to run concurrently.