A MIDDLEWICH teenager has been cleared of kidnapping and raping a 14-year-old girl in Crewe.

Oliver Patrick Boswell, 18 of Warmingham Lane, was found not guilty of kidnap, sexual assault and two counts of rape yesterday following a trial at Chester Crown Court.

The court had heard that Mr Boswell had arranged to meet the girl – who cannot be named for legal reasons – at Lakeside bowling alley only July 3. The girl arrived with one friend and the boy with two.

The pair chatted and Mr Boswell said the girl was ‘flirty’ and ‘playful’. She told him she was 17 and sat on his lap. He then carried her out of the building before she led him up some steps.

From there, the two slipped through a gap in a fence and had sex on a log in a wooded area.

Mr Boswell recalled that he did not know the area, adding: “She was leading the way. I had not been up those steps – I knew they were there but I did not know where they led to.

“She knew where she was going. I didn’t know nothing about it.”

He added: “When we got to the log she sat down. I sat down next to her and she got on top of my lap. We started to kiss and as we were kissing she was sexually touching me.

“When she was touching me I asked her if she wanted to have sex and she said yes.”

The pair returned to the bowling alley, where they remained for half an hour and were seen together in a large group on CCTV.

The girl then called her mum and asked to be picked up two hours earlier than had been agreed. After her friend had been dropped off, she broke down in tears and told her mum she had been raped.

After reporting the incident to police, the girl was examined at a sexual abuse clinic, where an injury was found that can occur in consensual or, ‘more commonly’, in non-consensual sex.

The following day another man was arrested and later released. Mr Boswell’s van was then seen heading down the M6 to Wolverhampton, and the jury were shown receipts to prove he was arranging a swap deal with his cousin.

Mr Boswell said he then went to Wales on a ‘Christian convention’, returning in August and handing himself in on August 16 after seeing a police appeal in a newspaper.

The jury also heard that the girl had made a similar allegation the previous year, against a different man whom she said had raped her twice. The following day, she retracted the allegations.

Mr Boswell was found not guilty of all charges by the jury after a three-day trial.

Speaking outside the court, his uncle said that the allegations had turned Mr Boswell’s life ‘upside-down’ and that ‘justice has been served’.