Simon Brown (left) beat Will Rowe to death (Picture: Kent Police)
A ‘devoted’ father of two who beat a paedophile to death has been jailed for manslaughter.
Simon Brown, 28, went into an ‘uncontrollable rage’ and beat convicted paedophile William ‘Bill’ Rowe, 71, to death after he allegedly ‘bragged and boasted’ about his crimes.
Rowe had been visiting a mutual friend’s house in Borstal, near Rochester in Kent, when Brown arrived, and the trio discussed Rowe’s crimes after being shown a news article about him.
He had been jailed two decades earlier for child sex offences and Brown claimed he boasted that his sexual offending ‘wasn’t the first time and probably wouldn’t be the last’.
Brown went into a rage and attacked Rowe, punching and kicking him over and over before leaving him for dead on the floor of friend Rose Ripley’s home.
Rowe’s body was found more than 27 hours later and he’d suffered as many as 27 fractures to 17 of his ribs.
Rowe had been convicted of child sex offences two decades ago (Picture: Kent Police)
Brown flew into an ‘uncontrollable rage’ and beat Rowe to death (Picture: Kent Police)
Brown went on trial accused of murder but the jury found him not guilty after 12 hours of deliberation.
He’d previously pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and earlier this week he was sentenced to 13 years in prison at Maidstone crown court.
Judge Julian Smith described the attack as ‘deliberate’ and ‘sustained’ and rejected Brown’s claim that Rowe had boasted about his offending.
During sentencing, he said: ‘The evidence that Bill Rowe, who denied his offending to all, had stood trial for it and who, since his release, had experienced hostility and rejection, became boastful of the most profound, predatory sexual offending to Simon Brown, is evidence I reject.
‘Whatever contempt and revulsion caused Simon Brown to attack Bill Rowe that night was not a brief burst of rage and violence measured in seconds but was deliberate, sustained and involved considerable force.
‘It is not disputed that Simon Brown started the incident. What is an issue is the suggestion that Bill Rowe was boasting and exulting in his previous sexual offending.
‘I am satisfied that this aspect of Simon Brown’s account and the contradictory support for it given by Rose Ripley is not in keeping with what is known of Bill Rowe’s attitude to those convictions and flies in the face of common sense.
‘It seems to me that when the article was viewed is not of critical importance given that I do not find Simon Brown’s account of being goaded by Bill Rowe boasting to be a credible one.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.