Kenneth John Aitken, 63, previously of Princes Highway, Heywood, pleaded guilty in the Warrnambool County Court on April 18 last year to five charges, including indecent assaults relating to a boy and girl.

In September Judge Mark Gamble directed Aitken be admitted to an intensive residential treatment program for three years and also imposed 18 months’ imprisonment which was suspended for three years. 

Aitken was also placed on the sex offenders’ register for life.

Judge Gamble said Aitken maintained entrenched beliefs supportive of child molestation, his prospects for rehabilitation were limited at best and the psychological and emotional impact of his offending on his victims had been severe.

Yesterday Aitken again appeared in Warrnambool County Court and pleaded guilty to two charges of buggery.

Crown prosecutor David O’Doherty said that at the time of the offending Aitken was 17 and 18 years old and living at Heywood and the victim was aged under 14.

Between the start of 1968 and the end of 1969 Aitken asked the victim to come and look at his ferrets or birds that he kept behind a shed, then pulled down the victim’s pants and assaulted him. 

A second similar incident happened when the victim went rabbiting with Aitken. Aitken was alleged to have assaulted the girl while she was in a bath. 

The court heard that Aitken had been charged in the 1980s and ’90s for other sex offences including wilful and obscene exposure, buggery and attempted buggery, but was not jailed.

The court was told Aitken clearly had a problem with his deviant sexual behaviour, he was mentally infantile and his thought processes childlike.