Former college caretaker guilty of rape

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

His victims, now in their twenties, were in court to hear him found guilty of two charges of rape, three of buggery and one of indecency with a child and indecent assault between February 1990. He was cleared of two further rape charges on one of the boys from between June 1997 and May last year.

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

They said that Sanderson drove them there 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 knockout 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 eventually the chloroform gave him a release from the inevitable rapes inflicted on him by Sanderson.

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

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

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

Sanderson, formerly of Darlington 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.