A retired project manager arranged to meet a 12-year-old girl at Silverburn shopping centre to pick her up for a sexual tryst in his Mercedes with blacked out windows. Married father David Devine set up the meeting with the child after spending days grooming her online and sending her a naked penis photograph.
But Devine – who had the user name ‘FamilyFirst’ and claimed to be a lawyer – did not realise he was chatting online to an undercover police officer until his home was raided. When officers arrived, he panicked and rushed to the toilet, where he deleted the Kik Messenger app containing the sexually explicit chats from his phone.
Devine, 60, of High Street in Dunblane, bizarrely claimed he was trying to “smoke out” online fakers by engaging them in graphic sexual conversations. He said it was “disgusting, embarrassing and humiliating” to hear the conversations played back and denied that he had set up a meeting with the girl on her day off from school.
He claimed he thought it was an adult he was ‘role playing with’ online, although he had been told ‘Mia’ was a 12-year-old girl and had been sent a photo of a female child. However, Sheriff Murdo McLeod found Devine guilty of the three charges he denied and deferred sentence for social work reports. He was granted bail and placed on the sex offenders register.
Devine told police: “I have been having some conversations but I didn’t think it was a minor. I thought it was someone impersonating a minor. She sent a picture, but whether it was her I don’t know. I didn’t believe it was the person I was chatting to. It’s embarrassing but I firmly believed it was someone impersonating.
“I thought I would catch them out. I was waiting for them to trip themselves up. I suspected it was some middle-aged man like myself. I was trying to smoke them out.”
Devine admitted he had lied about his job and his age – claiming to be 39 – and said he had become hooked on chatting online after retiring from his job and finding he had time to kill. He admitted sending ‘pages’ of sexually explicit messages over three days – telling ‘Mia’ she was making him ‘horny’ and that he was carrying out a sex act.
He admitted discussing meeting the girl at Silverburn and said he would carry out a sex act on her in his Mercedes car because it had blacked out windows and people could not see in. During a police interview, officers read back his messages and Devine said: “It sounds terrible when you hear it back. Totally humiliating. There was never an intention for that meeting taking place.
“The conversation itself is deeply embarrassing. I can’t believe I said all these things. I guess there was maybe an ego thing, of me trying to be smarter than them or outwit them.
“That was maybe the motivation I had. It’s online, anonymous, not real. I didn’t think there was any consequence to it. I didn’t believe they were 12. It was a feeling I had that this party was misrepresenting who they were.”
However, Devine was unable to explain during the trial at Perth Sheriff Court why he continued talking sexually to ‘Mia’ for three days without suggesting once they might not be a child. The crimes took place from Devine’s family home at Strathearn House, Auchterarder – in the shadow of Gleneagles Hotel – but the court was told he was no longer living there.
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