A FORMER Royal Navy petty officer lured four teenage boys to his flat and sexually assaulted them in strikingly similar circumstances to how he killed two sailors, a court heard.
Allan Grimson, 66, was jailed for life in 2001 for the murders of sailors Sion Jenkins, 18, and Nicholas Wright, 20.
He had invited the two young Navy seamen back to his flat and murdered them both with a baseball bat before dumping their bodies on two dates exactly a year apart in the 1990s.
On Tuesday, a court heard that around the same time of the killings, Grimson sexually assaulted three other young men in the Navy and one teenage boy in the same flat in Portsmouth, Hants.
The alleged incidents, which are said to involve four teenage male victims, took place between February 1994 and November 1999. Grimson was charged in February 2025.
Grimson, who denies the offences, is now on trial at Winchester Crown Court, Hants, accused of 11 counts of indecent assault, one count of rape and one count of taking indecent photographs of a child.
The court heard Allan Grimson, now 66, was jailed for life in 2001 for the murders of two sailors
Nicholas Wright, 18, and from Leicester, was killed by Grimson on December 12, 1997
Jurors were told Grimson molested the boys at his three-bed Portsmouth flat after inviting them back there, in similar circumstances to the killings of Mr Jenkins and Mr Wright.
The court heard he had been with them at the Portsmouth nightclub, ‘Joanna’s’ – which is also where he had been with his murder victims before taking them to his flat.
One of his four alleged sex attack victims said he could only tell police about the incidents after Grimson was jailed in 2001 because he then felt ‘safe’, it was heard.
Grimson served in the Royal Navy and in 1999 he was a Petty Officer Marine Engineering Mechanic and an instructor at the Royal Navy Firefighting School in Horsea Island, Portsmouth.
The court heard his position ‘brought him into contact with many young males aged in their late teens’ over whom he ‘exercised great authority, by reason of his status’.
John Price KC, prosecuting, said: ‘In the period with which the trial will mainly be concerned, the late 1990s, he was a man in his late thirties.
‘He had served with the Royal Navy since 1978. He was a big, powerful man and within the service admired as a capable instructor. He was a single man.’
Jurors were told that when his flat and that of his mother’s flat in the north east of England were both searched, images depicting naked men engaging in sexual activity were found on his computer.
The court heard the first alleged victim joined the Royal Navy in 1998 and attended one of Grimson’s firefighting courses – after which Grimson sent him letters and an 18th birthday card.
The pair then went on an evening out with another friend at Joanna’s nightclub in Southsea, Portsmouth.
At the end of the evening the three of them returned to Grimson’s flat and the alleged victim and Grimson shared a bed, with his friend sleeping in another bedroom.
The pair often went out drinking together and on another occasion he went back to Grimson’s flat. Grimson is accused of five counts of indecent assault and one of rape against him.
Mr Price said the victim claimed said: ‘Grimson tried to kiss me on my lips as we lay in bed. We had both been drinking.
‘I told Allan immediately to stop and that I wasn’t interested in anything like that. Allan stopped immediately and apologised.
‘We then talked about it and Allan told me that he wasn’t certain of his sexuality.
‘I told him that I didn’t have a problem if he was gay as long as he didn’t try anything on with me again.’
He later told police that Grimson had ‘taken advantage’ and ‘put pressure’ on him.
He also told them Grimson had once showed him his baseball bat which he described as his ‘pride and joy’.
Mr Price said: ‘As will be seen, Grimson has sought to portray his relationship towards that teenager as affectionate, if not loving and his towards him therefore as benign and caring.
‘On the other hand, [the victim] describes one which was exploitative, controlling and ultimately sexually abusive, including an act of rape.’
Grimson is also accused of four counts of indecent assault and one of taking indecent photographs of a child aged 14 in the spring of 1999 against another victim.
On one occasion he took him to Disneyland Paris and on another they watched the 1999 FA Cup Final at his flat in Portsmouth, the court heard.
The victim said Grimson took photographs of him naked and became angry when he asked him to stop and thought he would kill him were other people not in the flat.
In April 2001 the alleged victim contacted police and recorded a rape complaint, but found it ‘very difficult’ to speak about it in subsequent interviews.
Telling the jury about Grimson’s murder convictions, Mr Price KC said he killed them in his London Road flat and that ‘those two killings had occurred amidst sexual assaults by him upon them both’.
Mr Wright was killed on December 12, 1997, after he and Grimson had been at Joanna’s nightclub. After attacking him with a bat he put the body in the car before dumping it.
Two years later he told police where Mr Wright’s remains were then discovered.
Mr Price said: ‘Exactly the same thing occurred, exactly a year later, 1998, also on December 12.
‘Grimson and a man called Sion Jenkins, then aged twenty, left Joanna’s nightclub together and returned to Flat 143A, where Grimson killed Jenkins.
‘Again on his account he used his car to remove the body.
‘It was not until the evening of December 16, 1999, and after the police had found the body of Wright, that Grimson told them about Jenkins and identified for them the place where his body was concealed, which is where it was found.
‘Grimson told the police in December 1999 that he had killed Wright with a baseball bat, one which he said he had acquired in Diego Garcia, when he was there serving on a Royal Navy ship.’
The trial, due to last four weeks, continues.
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