Convicted sex offender football coach Barry Bennell dies in prison aged 69

Barry Bennell, the sex offender football coach, has died in prison aged 69.

The former Crewe Alexandra, Manchester City and Stoke City youth team coach, who was convicted of 50 sexual offences in 2018, is thought to have died at HMP Littlehey in Cambridgeshire on Saturday morning, say the Sun.

2

The outlet also claims that Bennell had cancer while serving a 34-year jail term.

Bennell had links to youth teams across Cheshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Greater Manchester, and was first jailed in 1994 in the US for abusing a 14-year-old British boy at a football camp in Florida.

He later returned to the UK where his offences were exposed by the 1997 Channel 4 Dispatches film Soccer’s Foul Play.

Bennell was then jailed for nine years at Chester Crown Court after admitting to 23 offences, and then two more years in 2015 when he admitted to enticing a child to commit an act of gross indecency in the 1980s.

In 2018, after a number of victims came forward, Bennell was then convicted of 50 sexual offences against 22 boys by Liverpool Crown Court.

During sentencing, Judge Clement Goldstone QC, said: “Your behaviour towards these boys in grooming and seducing them before subjecting them to, in some cases, the most most serious, degrading and humiliating abuse was sheer evil.

“In reality, you were the devil incarnate. You stole their childhoods and their innocence to satisfy your own perversion.”