Britain: A 14-year-old girl has described how Lindsell tried to groom her on the Internet by telling her he had cancer. He pretended to be a teenager and tried to set up a meeting with the girl, who was then 13, after meeting her in a chatroom.
He first tried to get her to phone him and said if she found his voice odd it was because he was on cancer drugs. Lindsell also pestered her into telling him what her school uniform looked like. Then, using that information, he found the school's website and found maps of how to get there.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, described how she met Lindsell in an MSN chatroom for teenagers. She said: "I was bored after school and went onto this chatroom that I visit sometimes. I don't spend hours on it but just when I'm bored. I sometimes talk to my friends from school and we all meet up in this chatroom. He came on and asked if I would like to chat and I invited him into my chatzone.
"He was asking my age and we got chatting, he was trying to get my e-mail address and phone number but after a while I thought he was weird. He kept changing his age between 15 and 19 and then started sending nasty e-mails saying 'I'm gonna find you' and 'I'm gonna f*** you' and stuff. So I deleted them and stopped talking to him and blocked him from my account."
Lindsell then changed tack, adopting a different e-mail address to get round the fact that he had been blocked and sending "nice" messages. The girl said: "He changed his e-mail address and I let him back in. In the end I decided I didn't want to talk to him though. He was weird. The way he talked and the way he spelt was not like other teenagers." He told the girl he had cancer "so if I ever spoke to him on the phone and thought his voice was weird, it was because of the cancer steroids he was taking". - (PA)