A PAEDOPHILE has been convicted of 53 counts of child sex abuse.

Robert Alan Jackson, 49, was found guilty of acts of indecency, indecent assaults, rapes and the attempted rapes of 12 girls at Manchester Crown Court after a four-week trial.

Jackson, a road worker, molested his victims while living in West Didsbury and Wythenshawe. The offences were against girls as young as seven years old and stretched from the 1970s to this decade. He was arrested in October last year.

At the time of his arrest he had moved away from Manchester and was living at Northfield Avenue, Pontefract.

For years the dad of three concealed his true nature behind the image of a caring family man who was a churchgoer and amateur football referee.

But his crimes finally caught up with him when one of his victims became a mum and decided she couldn’t bear the thought of him abusing any more youngsters. She told a relative her terrible secret.

Stories about Robert Jackson’s twisted behaviour were rife among children in West Didsbury. Incredibly, Jackson came close to discovery FIVE times, each time emerging unscathed.

The victim who suffered the most abuse at his hands told her mother in 2006. But then she pretended she had made it up and kept her silence for two more years until friends who had also been abused by Jackson came forward.

A couple of years earlier it had been suggested to a woman that her daughter had seen Jackson naked, but nothing came of the allegation because the youngster denied it.

Meanwhile Jackson’s oldest victim, who he abused while living in Wythenshawe in the 70s, told family members when she reached adulthood but never pursued the complaint.

In October 2007 Jackson was arrested in connection with an allegation of abuse made by another child but was soon after released without charge.

And, after moving to Pontefract he was accused of exposing himself to a four-year-old girl, the M.E.N. has learned, but no charges were brought.

Jackson showed no emotion as Judge Robert Atherton told him he faced ‘a very long sentence’.

After the case, the father of one of the victims said: "Everybody thought he was a cracking bloke.

"We had no idea what he was really like and when we found out we felt total disbelief. We can never recover; he has stolen our daughters’ childhoods."