A brutal sex offender has been working as a landscape gardener while failing to comply with the terms of his sexual offences registration.
Customers have been unaware Calum Cuthill served five years for a vicious sex attack on a student and secretly moved address in contravention of his strict release rules.
Sheriff William Wood told Cuthill: “You committed a very serious offence six years ago and the requirements of notification placed upon you are absolute in their terms.
“It is a serious matter and done so people know where you are, so the public can be protected.
“I have given consideration to a custodial sentence.”
However, the sheriff said that because Cuthill had a job he would allow him to keep his liberty and tagged him for three months and ordered him to carry out 150 hours unpaid work.
Cuthill has been working for his father as a landscape gardener and was supposed to tell police if he moved address under the terms of his registration.
But he moved out of a city centre flat in Perth and failed to let police know and was only tracked down weeks later, Perth Sheriff Court was told.
Cuthill, 26, of New Row, Perth, admitted failing in July last year of complying with a requirement to tell police he had moved within three days of doing so.
Depute fiscal Stuart Richardson told the court: “He was formerly living in High Street, Perth.
“It was rented from a letting agency.
“This came to light because police were dispatched to the flat to make sure he was still there, but they could never get an answer at the door.”
Solicitor David Sinclair, defending, said: “He recently started a new job as a landscape gardener.
“At the time he was moving house and changing job and it slipped his mind.”
Cuthill was jailed at the High Court in Edinburgh for subjecting a teenage girl to a “terrifying and degrading” sexual assault at Dundee University’s halls of residence.
He was found guilty of attacking the 18-year-old in November 2007.