Not sure if this happens where you live but in Ireland we have a disgusting thing in our justice system where people are allowed to provide character references for rapists etc, there's often so much love and support from those who were closest to them and they paint a very different picture of the man, doesn't have any relevance to the fact they haven't seen this persons dark side.
We see this all the time on here, no one knows a rapist but so many have a boyfriend/father/brother/friend who was falsely accused 🤔 despite rape being so common and false accusations being so rare.
Again you're on here talking about evidence, and certainty and how you're not picking a side but yet you take opinions of someone who knew him to mean he's not a pedophile, even though it's a well known fact that many pedophiles hide this so well from their loved ones and they never would have suspected.
But don't let the facts of life that you already know, get in the way of your conclusions, and continue to think that people who knew him would know if he was a pedophile or not. A lot of the time people who are closest to the pedophile and rapist are the ones who are even less likely to know because they are blinded by what they see as their good side.