A convicted child killer was freed from jail and allowed to live in a bail hostel because of a catalogue of failures by officials, according to a report.
The public were placed in a "position of avoidable risk" because the Parole Board decided to free paedophile Frank Parker without proper testing for psychopath tendencies, the probation watchdog said.
A report by Chief Inspector of Probation Andrew Bridges revealed shocking oversights in the supervision of Parker, who murdered a neighbour's 10-year-old daughter in a frenzied attack using a knife and an iron in 1966.
An assessment report written by a probation officer in 2004, the year before Parker was let out of jail, did not even mention the crime's sexual motive, Mr Bridges found.
The report - commissioned after a BBC Panorama documentary exposed failures in the bail hostel system - said: "Worryingly, in the description of his offending she cited his motivation to offend as having been his decision to burgle the house and missed out the sexual element of the offence.
"There was no mention made of the use of weapons, nor of his previous conviction for arson.
"She assessed his risk of harm as medium."
The report did not name Parker, referring to him as Resident K, but he was fully identified in the documentary broadcast last November.
Parker married three times while in prison and his third wife had grandchildren.
Secret filming in the documentary showed Parker befriending children and speaking of taking a photo of a semi-naked teenage girl who he invited up to his hostel room.
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