Sarah Sands Stabbed Michael Pleasted After He Abused Her Sons, and the Name-Change Law Written for Cases Like His Is Still Not in Force

CANNING TOWN, LONDON — On a night in late November 2014, Sarah Sands left a maisonette on an east London estate with a hood up and a knife in her hand. She walked to a neighboring block, into the flat of a 77-year-old man the neighbors knew as Michael Pleasted. She stabbed him eight times. He bled to death. A jury at the Old Bailey cleared her of murder and convicted her of manslaughter on the partial defense of loss of control. In September 2015, Judge Nicholas Cooke QC called the case truly exceptional and sent her to prison for three and a half years. The attorney general, Jeremy Wright QC, told the Court of Appeal that term was unduly lenient. On January 22, 2016, Lady Justice Macur, sitting with Mrs Justice Patterson and Judge Julian Goose QC, raised it to seven and a half years. Sands served close to four years and came out in 2018. The sentence is the part of this story that already has an ending. The reason a man with decades of sex convictions was living next door to her children, under a name the estate did not know, still does not.

Pleasted was Robin Moult. Across three decades he collected 24 convictions for sexual offenses, with jail terms attached. He was not on the sex offenders register because the register did not exist until 1997 and his earlier crimes sat on the wrong side of that date. He changed his name. The local council housed him. People on the estate in the Silvertown and Canning Town stretch of Newham brought him food. Sands, then 32 and a mother of five, has said he presented as a grandfather and that she had no reason to flinch. At the time she killed him he was on bail, waiting for a trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court on charges of sexual assault against two children under 13. The BBC waited until November 2022 to report what the trial could not: the boys in that case were her sons. Bradley was 12. The twins, Alfie and Reece, were 11.

The sons waived anonymity. In the BBC film Killing My Children’s Abuser, Bradley, by then 20, said he thought “hats off” when he learned what his mother had done, and that he was not going to deny it. Alfie, 19, said the killing made them feel safer and did not slow the nightmares. The security, he said, was not having to walk down the street thinking Pleasted would come around the corner. Reece said it was a relief to know the man was dead, and that a prison cell would have been just as satisfying if anybody had managed to put him in one before the night of the attack. The boys lived with their grandmother while Sands was inside. They saw her about once a month. They have said the bond held. They have also said the harm did not stop because the abuser’s heart stopped.

Sands told the BBC she went to the flat to frighten him. She said the world froze when he called the children liars, that he grabbed for the knife, and that she lost control. She has maintained she did not set out to kill him. The jury accepted loss of control, the partial defense in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 that can reduce murder to manslaughter. The Court of Appeal still treated the knife as the fact that set the years. Because she carried it to the scene, because the wounds were fatal, and because the jury was sure she intended at least really serious harm, the judges said the starting point should have been 10 years. Mitigation, including that she was a single mother who had admitted the manslaughter, pulled the term to seven and a half. Lady Justice Macur said any court dashes expectations with a heavy heart, and then did it. The judges also noted that she did not call emergency services. The Guardian reported the increase, after the original sentence.

She handed herself in with the knife. In Holloway she rang the boys daily and has described the months inside as a collapse she had to climb out of one ordinary day at a time. She told the BBC, in a line that does not flatter either her or the system, “I bring life into the world. It never occurred to me I’d be guilty of taking life.” On March 21, 2025, the Manchester Evening News wrote up her appearance on James English’s Anything Goes podcast. Asked what she would change, she did not name the stabbing. She said there was only one regret: letting him anywhere near the family. Asked how long it took to forgive herself, she said a long time, and that the forgiveness was recent. She described depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress as daily facts, and meditation, yoga, and exercise as the tools she actually uses. She cried, she said, every day for six months in prison. None of that is a legal defense. It is the part of the file a sentencing remark does not have room for, and it is why the sons’ line about nightmares still matters more than a true-crime thumbnail.

After release she joined a campaign that had a name before it had a working statute. Della Wright, whose abuser changed his name repeatedly, including between charge and plea, became the face of what supporters call Della’s Law, with the Safeguarding Alliance. Labour MP Sarah Champion carried it into Parliament. The hole is specific. A registered sex offender had to tell police within three days after starting to use a new name. A driving licence and a passport could follow, and a Disclosure and Barring Service check in the new name could come back clean. A Safeguarding Alliance request to prosecutors found that more than 11,500 registered sex offenders were prosecuted for failing to notify changes between 2019 and 2022. BBC data showed more than 700 going missing from the system between 2019 and 2021.

On February 25, 2025, Champion’s office said the government would move to stop registered sex offenders who pose a risk from changing their names unless police approved it. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 later wrote a tighter scheme into Part 5. Section 118 would insert a new section 83A into the Sexual Offences Act 2003, requiring a relevant offender to notify a new name at least seven days before using it, or as soon as practicable and in any event within three days if advance notice was not realistic. Later sections would let police demand approval before that person changed the name on a UK passport, a driving licence, or an immigration document, and would let police refuse when they were satisfied refusal was necessary to protect the public from sexual harm. The Home Office factsheet published on May 11, 2026, describes those powers as the answer to high-profile cases in which a name change was part of the offending. The text on legislation.gov.uk tells a colder story. Sections 118 to 126 are marked prospective. A commencement review current through September 30, 2026, found that none of that notification package had been brought into force by the Act’s own commencement provisions or by the statutory instruments that had switched on other parts of the law. A person subject to notification requirements on this day is still subject to the unamended Part 2 of the 2003 Act. On September 27, 2026, the Della’s Law account said five years on from a major broadcast investigation, consecutive governments had left sex offenders free to change their names.

The Ministry of Justice’s MAPPA figures, published October 30, 2025, counted 73,047 registered sex offenders in the community in England and Wales on March 31, 2025, up 4 percent in a year and 48 percent since 2015. That is the population the uncommenced sections were written to manage. Pleasted’s case is the one campaigners can say in a sentence. A convicted sex offender became a new neighbor. The council that housed him did not know the old name. The mother who had fed him found out from her children. The Court of Appeal spent its reasoning on the knife, which was the court’s job, and left the name to a commencement order that has not been made.

Related reporting from The AEGIS Alliance includes the Cheshire case of Corinna Smith, who must serve at least 12 years for killing her husband, convicted pedophiles stabbed in British prisons, and former teacher John McKno, who died at HMP Norwich while serving 14 years. More sits in Crime News.

Sands told interviewers she did what she believed a mother had to do, and she has spent the years since asking Parliament to do the thing she could not do with a knife: make a past name stick to a living man. Until section 83A is actually commenced, a deed poll can still outrun a neighbor. The Old Bailey answered the question of her guilt. It did not answer the question her sons still live with, which is why the man was there to befriend them at all.