Father Of 22 Children By 11 Women Is Spared Jail To Look After Baby

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via Daily Mail:
A jobless man who claimed to have fathered 22 children by 11 women was yesterday spared jail for dealing drugs – after telling a judge he needed to help care for his youngest. Raymond Hull, 58, who has been married only once and has lived off benefits for a decade, insisted ‘I just love kids’, but admitted he was in contact with only ‘about 12’ of them.

Despite police finding a stash of cannabis and text messages from customers, a judge accepted he was helping to raise child number 22 – seven-month-old Barry – while his partner returned to work. With ‘considerable hesitation’ the judge went on to impose a suspended sentence.

Afterwards Hull – who has a series of convictions dating back four decades – defended his unconventional lifestyle, saying he had ‘never been short of offers’.

‘I just love kids,’ he said. ‘I don’t regret anything, even though I don’t speak to them all. Some of them don’t even know I’m their dad.’ And he bragged: ‘I don’t know what it is about me, but I’m never short of offers.

‘It’s just my luck that every time I have a one-night stand, the girl ends up getting pregnant.

‘I’ve never had to chase after women. I’m easy going, they are always chasing me.

‘If it’s tidy, you don’t knock it back, do you?’

Hull claims to have fathered his first child when he was 16, but according to local birth records his eldest, John, was born when he was 19. Later that year, in 1975, he married John’s mother, Patricia, then just 17, and over the next nine years they had four more children – Raymond Jr, now 37, Joseph, 36, Adrian, 34, and Rebecca, 29.

‘I only know one or two of their birthdays, but they don’t mind. One of the girls got a sister for her birthday one year,’ he recalled yesterday.

The couple split up and Hull is listed as the father of three children – Leon, now 23, Rianna, 22, and Kane, 20 – by his next partner.

Two years ago he set up home in the Cumbrian village of Aspatria with a bakery worker less than half his age, 26-year-old Emma McNeil, and last year she gave birth to a baby boy, Barry. However, when he appeared in court this week he claimed to have fathered a total of 22 children.

Explaining how he fathered so many children by so many women, he said yesterday: ‘I’ve only been married once. I’ve got five kids with one woman; three with another; three with another; and three with another. I’ve got two kids with one woman and little Barry with Emma.

‘The others were just one each with different women.

‘Some of the girls were happy to give the relationship a go, others did not want anything to do with me after they got pregnant. I still keep in touch with all the women now though. I get on better with them now we’ve split.

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