A Pembroke Dock man is at risk of receiving a life sentence after a jury convicted him of multiple offences of rape and sexual assault on five young girls.

Stephen Bladen, aged 55, had claimed the accusations against him had been made up.

But a jury at Swansea crown court took just four hours to find him guilty of all 30 charges against him.

Judge Keith Thomas said he would sentence Bladen after a probation officer had prepared a report addressing the question of just how dangerous Bladen was.

Bladen, lately of Sycamore Street and once of School Gardens, Pembroke Dock, was further remanded in custody meanwhile.

Bladen’s offending began in the mid 1980s and continued until this year.

He raped an eight year old girl after threatening to kill her favourite bunny rabbit to get her not to struggle.

Bladen, a self employed painter and decorator, raped another girl after promising to give her sweets—and, afterwards, didn’t even bother.

The victim said that had stuck in her mind as a child.

One of his victims was just four or five when he stripped her naked and performed an indecent act.

The offending came to light when one of his victims decided she could not remain quiet any longer.

She contacted other females—by then grown women—and told them that she was about to contact the police and told them what had happened to her.

Four other victims came forward with similar accounts of abuse at the hands of Bladen.

One of them told police she had seen “weird” pornography on Bladen’s computer, featuring people being chased and having their private parts cut off.

Despite Bladen’s denials an investigation led by DC Oliver James, stationed at Tenby, uncovered pornographic images of children on a computer and a hard drive.

Bladen continued to deny doing anything wrong, and tried to frame a friend for downloading the images from the internet.

But more police work showed that Bladen had used the computer to make calls via the Skype system to his wife both before and after the images had been downloaded, proving that the machine had been in his possession at the relevant time.

Bladen will be sentenced in mid December.