UK Child Molester and Former Boarding-School Teacher John McKno Choked to Death on Prison Breakfast While Serving 14 Years

NORWICH, ENGLAND — John McKno, 74, was a boarding-school maths teacher who sexually abused five boys at schools in Suffolk, Devon, and Worcestershire in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2016 a court gave him 14 years for gross indecency, indecent assault, and serious sexual assaults. On September 29, 2020, five years into that sentence, he choked on breakfast on a wing at HMP Norwich and died of cardiac failure. Norfolk Coroners’ Court heard the inquest in March 2021. The BBC, Metro, and the New York Daily News printed the finding.

A 51-year-old man who was among McKno’s victims between 1975 and 1980 told the BBC his abuser belonged to a larger ring that sexually assaulted pupils. That is the sentence that should have been the story in 2016, not a choking death in 2020. Boarding-school abuse in England is a pattern, not an anecdote. The inquest recorded how he died. It did not reopen how many boys never saw a courtroom.

The AEGIS Alliance will not eulogize a convicted child molester. We will note that he died in custody of a banal accident while serving a sentence that still left decades of victims without a full accounting. Related: Sarah Sands and the killing of Michael Pleasted, UK prison stabbings of convicted pedophiles, the UK prison suicide of a baby abuser, and more Crime News.