the jury was discharged and a new trial date set. On 9 April 2010, after a five-minute hearing, the case was thrown out by the judge as two key prosecution witnesses, police officers who had searched his home three and a half years earlier, failed to appear in court. The police declined to comment and the CPS refused to disclose how much the investigation had cost the taxpayer. Graham Ovenden described the police as "totally and utterly transfixed by childhood sexuality" and himself as "a controversial figure and, at the moment, a very angry old man". The prosecution declined to launch an appeal. 2013 charges, prosecution and conviction On 19 April 2010, the Western Morning News said the Child Abuse Investigation Team of the Metropolitan Police, the force which had carried out the three and a half-year investigation for the trial, was investigating Ovenden over allegations of child sex abuse. Ovenden said such allegations had been made at the start of the previous investigation and dropped, and that, "the Metropolitan Police are being very vindictive about this." In March 2013, Ovenden went on trial at Truro Crown Court, accused with nine charges of indecency with a child and indecent assault on victims aged between six and 14. He denied the claims. On 2 April, Ovenden was found guilty of six charges of indecency with a child and one charge of indecent assault against a child. The charges came from adults who claimed they had been abused by Ovenden as children. Some of them involved claims that he abused children while they were posing for his pictures. The abuse charges related to incidents between 1972 and 1985. Ovenden was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, suspended for two years. On 9 October 2013 the Appeal Court increased his sentence to an immediate prison term of 27 months. Following his conviction, the Victoria and Albert Museum removed half of their 14 Ovenden images from its website, and the Tate removed 34 of his images from its online collection, although it later reinstated images of three abstract landscapes. In 2015, District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe ordered that Ovenden's personal collection of paintings and photographs, created by him and others, be destroyed, stating: "I have very little doubt that sexual gratification is, at the very least, part of Mr Ovenden’s reasons for making these images." Ovenden responded to the press that: "“I am a famous artist.