Care worker's sex confession `ignored by police'

A care worker who gave himself up to the police and confessed to a string of sex abuse crimes was told to go away and come back later, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.

David Blankfield explained he had become a Christian and wanted to reveal what he had done over the years while employed both in a hospital and in a residential home for the handicapped.

"It may be that police could not really believe what they were hearing, because in a short time the interview was terminated. He was told to go away and come back later that week, if he still felt the same," said Brian O'Neill, for the defence.

Blankfield, 40, from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex was jailed for a total of 30 months. He admitted indecently assaulting three mentally handicapped patients and a child in the early 1980s and indecently assaulting a ten- year-old girl in 1994. Blankfield was working for an East Sussex hospital when the first assault occurred. He then went to work for social services in central London at a residential home between 1981 and 1985.