Court hears prisoner and nurse seen “having sex” in staff room

A health care officer told a jury yesterday she walked in on a colleague having sex with a prisoner and did not report it because she did not want to get her into trouble.

Carolyn Falloon said she was shocked to see what Karen Cosford and Brian McBride were doing in a staff room at the health centre in Wakefield Prison. “It looked like they were having sex.”

Cosford did not say anything to her but McBride “started laughing and asked me if I was a voyeur and did I like to watch,” she told Leeds Crown Court.

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Falloon said she walked out and did not tell anyone. “I didn’t know what to say. She was a colleague with a small child, I just never mentioned it.”

She told her counsel Adrian Keeling QC “I did not want to get her into trouble. At the time I didn’t know what to do really.”

Subsequently she kept quiet believing McBride had gangster contacts outside the prison who would harm her if she did not.

Earlier Cosford, a prison nurse told the jury that she was not consenting to sex with McBride when she was seen in the staff room but was being raped by him and was too terrified of threats against her and family to tell anyone.

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She said that was the second time McBride, who was serving life for rape, had attacked her in that way.

She believed he was ex SAS with gangster contacts and McBride’s threats after he had raped her the first time that her home would be petrol bombed if she spoke against him.

She went along with what he told her to do and could understand Falloon might have got the wrong impression.

Cosford said on another occasion she was raped in a doctor’s office in the health centre by McBride who also subjected her to frequent sexual assaults.

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She wrote affectionate text messages and a love letter to him in that period because he wanted her to. “I was just physically and mentally a complete wreck.”

Cosford denied under cross-examination by Richard Wright prosecuting that she had fabricated the rape account to explain her affair with McBride which he suggested was begun because she thought he had lots of money.

“That is not true, I was raped,” she said.

Cosford, 47 of Altofts, Wakefield, Falloon, 50 of Walton, Wakefield and two other prison nurses Jacqueline Flynn, 46 of South Kirkby and David Sutherland, 49 of Lofthouse, Wakefield all deny misconduct.

The trial continues.

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