A pensioner has been jailed for corrupting a 12-year-old girl who he abducted from council care and paid her to have sex with him.
John Goode groomed the girl and bribed her with sweets, cigarettes and gifts before paying her £30 a time for sex and left her £3,000 in his will.
The 71-year-old was found with a passport and £33,000 of cash in a bag when he was arrested by police as he prepared to flee the country.
He was arrested after the girl, by now aged 13, absconded from a Devon County Council care home earlier this year and it was discovered he had given her a lift in exchange for sex.
Goode started grooming the girl after she offered to do errands at his home for money when she was just 11. He persuaded her to have sex with him several times a week, paying her £30 a time, which she spent on alcohol, amphetamines and cocaine.
The girl suffered severe behavioural problems which have led her to be taken away from her home in Devon and put into foster care in Cornwall but Goode carried on visiting her and abusing her.
She was moved to a council home in East Devon but Goode defied a police warning to stay away and abducted her in March this year.
The abuse had such a devastating impact on the victim that at the age of just 14 she told police she saw herself as a prostitute.
Former Royal Navy sailor Goode, of Sandringham Road, Newton Abbot, admitted a specimen count of rape, child abduction, and sexual activity with a child.
The statutory rape charge relates to repeated acts of oral sex when she was 12 and 13 and too young to give consent. The other two charges relate to him removing her from council care and having sex with her in March.
He was jailed for 15 years by Judge Jonathan Fuller at Exeter Crown Court.
He told him:"You groomed this girl within the space of a few week to the position where you asked to have sex with you for payment and over the next 18 months you abused her regularly and paid her approximately £30 a time, several times a week.
"You knew she was particularly vulnerable and frustrated the efforts of social services to keep her safe by facilitating her absconding. Sex toys with her DNA on them were found at your address.
"Before your arrest you were tipped off by her that police were investigating and you had your bags packed and it is good fortune that police arrested you before you went abroad.
"It is a particular aggravating feature that you repeatedly took her out of care and there was grooming from the early stages."
Mr Adrian Chaplin, prosecuting, said Goode's grooming led to the girl agreeing to have sex with Goode for gifts and money, including £3,000 he has left for her in his will.
He said:"When he was arrested on suspicion of abduction he was found to have £33,000 in a plastic bag and another bag containing clothes and a passport and showed every sign of being in a position to decamp when police attended his home.
"It is the Crown's case the exploitation in which the girl was involved was so entrenched that he had no regard to the obvious risks to which he was exposing her. He had no regard to her being taken from a place of safety.
"She has been in care since 2012 and she has been set back in every aspect of her development. She described herself in her interview as a prostitute."
Mr Rupert Taylor, defending, said:"There was no violence or threats of violence or degradation. The abduction was technical. She wanted to get away from the restrictions of care and he facilitated that. He acted as a taxi service.
"It was ongoing relationship because there was a friendship, perverse though it may sound, to the extent he is leaving money to her in his will. He was old, lonely and unwell."
He said Goode suffered sexual abuse in his own childhood at the notorious Forde Park care home in Newton Abbot.
