A PENSIONER has been cleared of abusing a young girl in his garden and a shed at his home in Newton Abbot  more than 20 years ago.

Former mechanic Leslie Barr was acquitted of all charges by a jury at Exeter Crown Court after they had been out for less than an hour.

He was found not guilty after telling them that the allegations were ‘entirely ridiculous’ and saying he had never been alone with the girl in the shed, where he kept food for birds which he kept in his aviary.

His wife and daughter also gave evidence that he had spent almost no time with the girl, who his wife babysat for during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

 They both said it was his wife Linda who was responsible for looking after the girl and confirmed Mr Barr’s account that he spent most of his time away from the house, either looking after horses at Coombe-in-Teignhead or restoring a vintage Jaguar at a lockup in Newton Abbot.

Mr Barr also denied that the girl had ever been into his bedroom and said he had never kept pornography in his car, a detail which the complainant gave to the police during her video interview.

He told the jury that her claims that he tried to have sex with her over a bench in his garden shed could not be true because he is diabetic and suffered from erectile dysfunction at the time.

Mr Barr produced old photographs of his garden which appeared to contradict the woman’s account of looking out of a window in the shed during one sexual assault.

He also said there would have been no room in the shed because it was used to store his bird food and sometimes to house his breeding pair of African Grey parrots

Mr Barr, aged 74, of Queensway, Newton Abbot, denies seven counts of indecent assault and was found not guilty of all of them and discharged by Judge David Evans at Exeter Crown Court.

During the case, the prosecution said the girl had gone to Mr Barr’s home between the ages of six and nine. She made some form of complaint when she was about 12 but her family chose not to make it official.

She went to the police again in 2019 and gave an interview in which she said Mr Barr abused the girl when she was at his house by putting his hands up her top or down her trousers and on one occasion inserted something which she believed to be his penis into her while they were alone in the shed.

Barr told the jury he had been a motor mechanic until having to give up work because of diabetes and that he then did some gardening and other jobs as well as looking after horses which he kept at Coombe in Teignhead and the birds which he kept in his garden.

He said the diabetes also left him incapable of getting an erection and made him disinterested in sex.

He said his wife ‘wore the trousers’ in their home and would have ‘thrown him out on the street’ if he had misbehaved. He also denied keeping a pornographic magazine in his car.

He said: ‘I never sexually abused that child in any way. I did not rape her in the shed. It is entirely ridiculous. I haven’t got the foggiest idea why she said these things.’