A former councillor jailed last year for molesting children has died in an Oxford hospital.

Peter Orme, 79, from Milton Keynes, was found guilty last year of gross indecency with a boy under 14, indecent assault on a girl under 14, indecent assault on a girl under 16 and taking an indecent photograph of a child.

He was jailed at Aylesbury Crown Court for 12 years and nine months.

In an impact statement read to Orme’s sentencing hearing last year, one of his four victims told the judge: “The hardest thing was telling my children that monsters do exist.”

On Wednesday (March 8), Oxford Coroner’s Court heard that Orme had been admitted to the John Radcliffe Hospital from HMP Bullingdon, near Bicester, on February 22. He died later that day - almost exactly a year after he was sentenced. 

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Opening his inquest, senior coroner for Oxfordshire Darren Salter said the medical cause of death had been given as bronchial pneumonia and hypertensive heart disease. It was contributed to by type two diabetes, the coroner said.

He had been identified to hospital staff by prison officers from HMP Bullingdon.

Mr Salter said that although Orme had died of natural causes, because he had died while in custody a full inquest would need to be held.

That inquest will take place on October 3.

Last year, the Oxford Mail’s sister paper the Bucks Free Press reported that Orme had physically and sexually assaulted four different victims, one boy and three girls, between the 1970s and the 1990s.

Sentencing the former Milton Keynes parish councillor, Judge Geoffrey Payne said: “You used wicked and systematic cruelty towards them.

“Over the course of the trial, you dismissed them as conspirators.

“They were telling the truth, they were believed and their accounts were heard.”

One of Orme’s female victims told the court: “I think the mental torture was just as bad as the physical, the gaslighting, the mental abuse, even now when people speak to me, I question what’s behind it – he used to play mind games.”

His male victim, who was bullied, belittled, punched and sexually assaulted, said in an impact statement read by the prosecutor: “What he did was basically break me, it has totally destroyed my brain, it has taken away my willpower, it’s hard to be positive about things.

“When I look back all I can say is how could he? How could someone do that and not give a s***?

“I don’t think there’s one bit of remorse for what he did. I used to feel sorry for him, then I hated him. Now I feel numb.”