The recent conviction of a sixty-six year old woman for stalking sixty-four year old actor Martin Shaw is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to geriatric sex offending, a top sexologist believes. “Believe me, just because the body is aged, the desires and urges to commit perverse acts don’t dim,” opines Tom Booblander. “In the past, it was physical infirmity which eventually forced most sexual deviants to retire from active offending – it’s not easy to grope women’s breasts from a wheelchair, for instance.” However, with increasing numbers of people in the developed world living longer, healthier lives, remaining physically active well into old age, Booblander believes that there is a very real risk of an explosion of incidents of stalking, flashing and sexual harassment by pensioners. “Not only will the hardcore perverts still be offending into their eighties and nineties, but they are likely to be joined by hordes of previously sexually conventional old people,” says the forty-two year old Californian. “Sadly, because of society’s ageist prejudices, opportunities to express their sexuality normally will become scarcer as they age, forcing them to explore less conventional means in order to satisfy their urges.” Dennis Nudger, a seventy-three year old deviant convicted of a string of sexual offences against elderly ladies agrees with Booblander’s analysis. “I blame society’s obsession with youth for my crimes,” he declared at his trial. “The media treats the whole idea of anyone over the age of sixty having sex as being disgusting. Consequently, if you have a pension and want to get laid, you’re treated as some kind of despicable pervert. If you try to pull young girls you are a dirty old man, if you go for grannies you are a filthy beast. I had no choice but to do what I did.” The judge at his trial disagreed, sentencing Nudger to seven years for his reign of terror, which included mailing full colour photographs of his genitalia to several female neighbours of pensionable age. “It was disgusting – his scrotum looked like a shrivelled walnut; old and wrinkly with scraggly grey pubic hair. It was photographed in extreme close up – just hanging there all limp and flaccid. It was like the last turkey in the shop!” claims the son of one of his victims, eighty-two year old Edna Gravel, who suffered a fatal heart attack upon seeing the photograph. “No wonder she keeled over when she saw that!” At his trial Nudger argued that the sight of his todger couldn’t possibly have been the cause of Gravel’s seizure. “He reckoned that his genitalia were pretty handsome – with their silver pubic hair, he thought they bore a striking resemblance to Omar Sharif,” says Gravel’s son. “But my brother reckoned that Walter Matthau – gnarled, sour and wrinkly – was a better likeness.”

Nudger’s campaign had also included making obscene phone calls to several other elderly female victims. “He used to call my Aunt Mabel up in the middle of the afternoon, telling her in explicit detail how he fantasised about pouring honey all over her naked body so that it ran into every wrinkly crevasse and crease,” explains Arlene Fabwunt. “It was horrible, filthy stuff – he apparently went on to describe how he would then force her to roll around in a pit full of peanuts – so that she looked like nut brittle that he could nibble on for hours, before picking the bits out of his dentures. My aunt was severely traumatized – she had to turn her hearing aid right up to hear all the details, he was breathing so heavily.” The interior of Nudger’s house bore witness to his obsessions. The walls were plastered with huge photographs of the objects of his affection – some apparently surreptitiously taken by himself. These included coy semi-naked shots of several octogenarian neighbours, seemingly taken through their bathroom windows using a telescopic lens. A large collection of pornographic pictures of several older female celebrities, including Anne Robinson, Cilla Black and Thora Hird. However, geriatric sex offenders aren’t the only problem facing Britain’s ageing population. “There is evidence that there are growing numbers of gerontophiles – younger people who are sexually attracted to the old,” says Booblander. “It must be understood that these aren’t simply ‘toy boys’, or ‘trophy wives’. These are dangerous deviants seeking to exploit the confusion and vulnerability of the old for their own sexual gratification.” Indeed, the sexologist claims that some of these gerontophiles have already infiltrated care homes for the elderly and are busy taking illicit snaps of old ladies getting out of their hip baths, whilst others are believed to enjoy dressing up as OAPs – wearing surgical supports, false teeth, incontinence pants and hearing aids for sexual arousal. “The attraction is obvious – these young people see their victims’ age as evidence of vast sexual experience,” Booblander explains. “Several that I’ve interviewed during therapy sessions have also told me that they believe that as old people are clearly not normally getting their legs over on a regular basis, they will be more desperate for sex, and therefore easier to get off with than younger people. They are clearly trying to rationalize their aberrant behavior as a form of social service for the elderly.”

Most disturbingly, Booblander claims that gerontophiles are becoming highly organized. “Gerontophile rings have been established,” he asserts. “Whilst most of their activities seem to involve simply swapping pictures of their grannies on the internet, there is growing evidence that some of them are exchanging information on potential targets, so that they can systematically exploit particularly vulnerable pensioners.” Indeed, it has been claimed that convicted peadophile and geriatric glam rocker Gary Glitter’s recently abandoned appeal against court-imposed travel restrictions, was to be based on the assertion that he had suffered a miscarriage of justice, and had actually been the victim of such a gang of gerontophiles. “Far from being the dangerous sexual predator portrayed by the press, Mr Glitter was, in fact, the victim,” explains Roland Greene-Farte, of Bigg-Wang Associates, the law firm engaged to present the appeal. “Far from having spent the past forty years harassing young girls, we aimed to show that Mr Glitter was himself being victimized by a group of young women obsessed with having sex with older men.” Greene-Farte and his team had planned to show how, over the course of nearly four decades, a series of girls, some as young as thirteen, had flung themselves at Glitter, seducing him with promises of doing his shopping and helping him cross the road. “It was appalling – they’d use their apparent innocence and alluring school uniforms to lull my client into a false sense of security,” says the lawyer. “Once they had his trust, they’d strike! One minute they were a harmless child sitting innocently on his lap, the next thing he knew, they were forcibly performing oral sex on him!” However, the defence foundered when Greene-Farte was unable to produce any of the alleged gerontophiles and police were unable to confirm the existence of any organised gerontophile rings. Forced to abandon the appeal, the solicitor blames ageism its failure. “It’s institutionalised – the entire criminal justice system refuses to acknowledge the existence of these gerontophiles, simply because the idea of the old being seen as sexually desirable by someone younger, is considered socially unacceptable,” he declares. “It’s disgraceful – how many more miscarriages of justice will there have to be before the legal establishment is forced to abandon these blinkered attitudes?”