Yahoo News Serial rapist Joseph McCann given 33 life sentences for string of attacks on 11 women and children
Serial rapist Joseph McCann was today branded a cowardly “psychopath” as he was handed 33 life sentences for a spree of abductions and rapes against women and children that terrorised the country.
Joseph McCann, 34, grabbed victims at random from the street and subjected them to appalling violent and sexual ordeals during a two-week long rampage across England.
He had been wrongly released from prison at the time of the depraved crime spree, and Mr Justice Edis today demanded a public investigation into how McCann had been set free to launch a “campaign of rape”.
McCann refused to attend his trial and was convicted last week of 37 charges including rape and kidnap . He remained cowering in his cell at HMP Belmarsh and complaining of a bad back as he was sentenced today.
“Joseph McCann, you are very dangerous indeed to people who are weaker than you are”, said the judge. “Among other things, you are a coward, a violent bully, and a paedophile.
“A coward because you have been unable to face your accusers and chosen instead to hide in your cell whining about conditions in which you are being held.”
The judge said McCann has a “tenuous grip on reality” who had put forward a “ridiculous” defence at trial, adding: “You are a classic psychopath.”
He stopped short of imposing a whole life sentence on McCann, but said the predator is likely to remain a danger to women and children until old age strips him of his strength.
“You should not have been a liberty to commit these offences, unless the parole board recommended your release”, the judge added.
“It seems to me there should be a systematic and independent investigation, reporting in public, as to how the system failed to protect victims from him.”
McCann had been free from prison for just two months when he carried out the first attack on April 21, snatching a woman in the street in Watford as she walked home from a nightclub and raping her at knifepoint.
He struck again on April 25, subjecting a woman to a terrifying 14-hour ordeal and taking another woman prisoner as she walked along the street with her sister.
As his identity became known to police and then the public, McCann used his network of contacts to hide from the nationwide manhunt, but he emerged again on May 5 to start a devastating 12-hour spree of offending against victims as young as 11-years-old.
McCann had been locked up to protect the public in 2008 for a knifepoint burglary at an 85-year-old pensioner’s home, spending nine years behind bars before being deemed fit for release.
However when he committed another burglary just four months after being set free, in 2017, the probation service failed to order his return to prison.
McCann was given a three-year sentence for that burglary, but was set free automatically at the halfway point, in February 2019 and just weeks before the rape spree began.
The court was told today that he had an angry run-in with a probation worker three days before the first offence, when he revealed that an engagement with his new girlfriend had ended after her family found out about his criminal past.
In a statement, probation worker Michael Eastwood said McCann had been given a warning notice because he had failed to tell them about his new relationship.
“He was not happy”, he said. “He tried to explain that if you get with someone in the travelling community then you marry them, hence why he said they were engaged but he claimed they had only got together two days previously.
“He accepted the warning but he was not happy.
“When her parents found out about the licence conditions, they had broken off the relationship. They thought he was a sex offender due to the conditions he had been under.”
McCann was eventually captured at the end of the catalogue of offence as he hid up a tree in Cheshire, following a prolonged police chase.
He had by that point raped two children while their mother was tied up in the next room, and left one victim fearing she was to become a “sex slave” and trafficked abroad.
Other said they believed they would be killed along with their families, while one woman said: “You know when you can see inside someone’s eyes and you know they are pure evil.”
In his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Edis said: “This was a campaign of rape and abduction of the kind I have never seen or heard of before.”
McCann, originally from the Aylesbury area, denied but was convicted of ten counts of false imprisonment, seven rapes, one rape of a child, two counts of causing or inciting a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, seven counts of kidnap, one count of attempted kidnap, three counts of causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, three counts of assault by penetration, one count of sexual assault and two counts of committing an offence with intent to commit a sexual offence.
He will be 64-years-old before he can first apply for possible release from prison.