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It was a paedophile ring that saw men indulge in their sick fantasies wearing hooded robes and terrifying their young victims with daggers.

Decades of abuse culminated in a trial which dramatically implicated a parish councillor ‘witch’ and the victim of a partly unsolved murder that shocked the county a decade earlier.

The two men accused of being part of a paedophile ring that ran a witches’ coven in St Ives carrying out “ritualistic, sickening” sex abuse of young girls, were given lengthy jail sentences in December 2012.

Jack Kemp and Peter Petrauske, both from Falmouth, spent years tormenting their female victims, one said to be as young as three years old.

Both men had denied any involvement in the abuse, claiming they were victims of a “witch-hunt”.

But a jury at Truro Crown Court dismissed their protestations, convicting the pair of a string of offences dating back to the Seventies, as well as finding Kemp guilty of several more recent sexual assaults unconnected to Petrauske.

Jailing Kemp for 14 years and Petrauske for 18, Judge Graham Cottle told them: “The offences range from the extremely serious to the truly horrifying.”

Petrauske was said to be the “high priest” of a witches’ coven that met in an undisclosed location in St Ives and ordered the girls to carry out his sick fantasies. The court heard Kemp videoed the abuse.

He also took part in the assaults, along with friends Peter Solheim – who was later found murdered and mutilated floating off the Lizard – and Stan Pirie, a notorious paedophile who died in jail following his conviction for sex abuse in the mid-2000s.

Judge Cottle told them: “You are two of the surviving members of a paedophile ring, together with others whose names have been repeated frequently in this trial who were members of a ring that operated in Falmouth in the Seventies and Eighties.

“I’m satisfied that you have both had a lifelong sexual interest in young, female children.

“It [the trial] has featured ritualistic, sickening abuse of young, young children. The scars left on (two victims, who cannot be named for legal reasons) are so obvious that it would seem extremely unlikely that either of them have any real prospect of recovery.

“Finally, the truth about your lies and your undoubted propensities has caught up with you.”

The duo’s victims gave harrowing evidence from behind a screen during the three-week trial. They told how they had been abused by their tormentors before being given money and sweets to buy their silence.

Petrauske was convicted of rape, aiding and abetting an attempted rape, and indecent assault. Judge Cottle sentenced him to 18 years in prison.

Kemp was found guilty of ten sexual offences including indecent assault and indecency with a child, and was handed a 14-year term.

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The Solheim link

The jailing of two members of the Cornish paedophile ring who ritualistically sexually abused young girls echoed the murder of witch” Peter Solheim.

During the case Mr Solheim was named by victims as part of the paedophile ring.

The court heard the men indulged their sick fantasies wearing hooded robes and terrified their young victims with daggers.

But it was not the first time the name Peter Solheim had been uttered in the same breath as child sex attacks and witchcraft.

Six years before in the same court room at Truro in front of the same judge his name was at the centre of a sensational trial.

Mr Solheim’s lover Margaret James was accused and convicted of playing a leading role in his grisly murder.

James was charged after the 56-year-old former parish councillor’s drugged, mutilated corpse was found floating in seas off the Cornish coastline by a passing trawler.

While James was found guilty of conspiracy to murder and jailed for 20 years, the other plotters have never been unmasked and remain at large today. It was said that James became aware of Solheim’s plans to leave her to be with a long-term mistress.

A police spokesman said: “The investigation into Peter Solheim’s murder has never been closed.

“Officers from this particular case have worked closely with officers investigating his death to ensure any potentially relevant new evidence is reviewed.

“We continue to urge anyone who may have new information regarding Mr Solheim’s death to come forward to the police.”

During James’ trial in the summer of 2006 a grim picture of Solheim was revealed.

Paul Dunkels, QC, defending James, outlined to the jury Mr Solheim’s obsession with witchcraft and sex. He made thousands of pounds swapping and selling antique firearms and other weapons.

The court also heard he was a pagan, prone to casting spells on people who upset him.

And he had been accused of being a paedophile by members of the local community at Carnkie, near Helston, where he lived.

Indeed unknown hands had sent him hate mail for his unsavoury appetite for young children, argued the defence team.

On three occasions Mr Dunkels applied for a bad character application to show the darker side of Solheim’s nature.

When a judge allows such an application the jury may hear a person’s previous convictions or “reprehensible behaviour” as evidence.

The QC’s strategy was to persuade the jury that because the dead man’s behaviour was so questionable anyone could have hatched the murder plot and eventual slaying.

Judge Graham Cottle eventually granted the application.

Mr Dunkels argued: “We say Peter Solheim was a man with the propensity to commit sexual offences against children, to trade in illegal firearms and to engage in black magic and satanic rituals. This provides anyone with a motive for harming him which ends up with him being dead.”

Details of Mr Solheim’s sordid existence were laid bare including his dealing in hardcore pornography by copying videos before selling them on – his attic was described as an “occult laboratory”.

It included recipes for potions designed to seduce women and dozens of books of witchcraft.

During Kemp and Petrauske’s trial, defence witness Eleanor Watson shone a light on Mr Solheim’s warped nature when she described him as being on the “dark side”.

She told the court she became friendly with Petrauske when he attended a wicca ceremony at her home in St Ives in the middle 1990s.

Mrs Watson said ceremonies were held throughout the year at different locations, in gardens, and woods and on the beaches.

She said: “They never involved nakedness or robes and hoods, and only on very rare occasions do children attend. I did write a pagan play for them to perform in my garden.

“Peter Solheim attended a couple of meetings before he fell out with me and I told him he was not allowed to attend any more.

“He was on the dark side."

As well as Mr Solheim, another figure loomed large during the crown court trial in the shape of convicted paedophile Stanley Pirie.

He was a friend and neighbour of Kemp’s and faced a trial of his own in 2005 at Truro Crown Court.

The jury returned unanimous verdicts on a list of sexual offences and he was jailed for 12 years.

Victims of Pirie’s depravity were to go on and give evidence of the vile abuse they had also suffered at the hands of Kemp and Petrauske.