Ex-caretaker guilty of assaults on children

John Sanderson, 35, who attacked the two boys at a teachers' centre in Darlington, where he worked for two years, was impassive when the jury brought in their verdicts after an eight-day trial at Teesside Crown Court.

His victims, who are now in their twenties, were in court to hear him found guilty of two charges of rape, two other serious sex assaults and one of indecency with a child and indecent assault.

He was cleared of two further rape charges on one of the boys between June 1997 and May last year.

One of the victims tried to kill himself over his ordeals at Darlington's Northgate Centre and the other blamed Sanderson for him becoming a drug addict at the age of 15.

They said Sanderson drove them to the centre in his white Ford Capri with blacked-out windows and that he kept a bottle of chloroform in the college cellar next to a rocking horse.

The first time he drugged them he poured the liquid into white dust masks and told them to put them on. The boys woke up alone in separate rooms, half naked and with throbbing heads.

But one said in evidence that the chloroform eventually gave him a release from the inevitable rapes inflicted on him by Sanderson.

The college produced tapes of television programmes for schools and Sanderson used the equipment to play pornographic videos before sexually abusing the boys.

Sanderson had denied all their claims. He told police that when they began investigations into the allegations he had tried to kill himself with a drugs overdose of 17 Ecstasy tablets.

He said he never had access to chloroform, but police found it was used in the production process at the engineering firm Ebac, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham, where Sanderson went to work after the college.

Sanderson, formerly of Bishop Auckland, Darlington, Escomb and Shildon, and now of Dunholme Road, Newcastle, was remanded in custody for reports before sentence. Judge Tony Briggs told the jury that no doubt they found it a distressing case.