A FORMER Merseyside care worker was jailed for six years on Monday after being convicted of sexually abusing girls in her care.

50-year-old Gail Stack repeatedly shouted out that she was not guilty during Judge Ian Crompton's sentencing remarks and when she was led to the cells turned round in fury to two of her victims sitting behind her in the public gallery and hurled abuse at them.

The jury of four men and eight women at Liverpool Crown Court had taken less than an hour to find her guilty of seven charges of indecent assault and one of indecency with a child.

The offences occurred between 1974 and 1978 while the three victims were resident at Derwent House, then an assessment centre, in Old Swan, Liverpool, where Stack was a supervisor.

Judge Crompton told Stack, of Waterpark Road, Prenton, that the maximum sentence for the offences at the time was two years - and he imposed three consecutive sentences of two years for each victim.

"They were particularly nasty assaults. These girls were very young and in particularly difficult circumstances. They were disturbed children through no fault of their own and they had the heartbreak of being taken from their homes and placed in a children's home supposedly in the care of social services.

"In fact they were placed in an establishment which was a paradise for a paedophile like you."

He added: "It is hard to imagine a more serious abuse of trust than that placed in a social worker responsible for children of this kind."

During the six day trial, the victims - aged 12, 14 and 15 at the time of the abuse - said that Stack had been 'cold, forbidding and cruel'.

Mr John McDermott, prosecuting, said that the offences came to light as part of a Merseyside police investigation into institutionalised child abuse.

The oldest victim claimed that another woman at the home had also been involved in three attacks on her.

Stack denied the allegations and said she did not know why they had fabricated the evidence. She told the court she was married for 13 years until 1983, had had a partner since then and was 'definitely heterosexual'.

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