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Belfast Crown Court
A female victim of an alleged pervert pensioner who subjected two young girls to years of sexual abuse and cruelty, including allegedly forcing them to drink his urine and eat his faeces, told a court this week how she tried to kill him.
The jury in Belfast Crown Court at Laganside heard the woman, now in her 50s, recall how she tried to get justice by attacking the man who she said had first stolen her innocence when she was just seven years of age.
The attacks began, the court was told, 35 years ago, as the youngster prepared to make her First Holy Communion.
She is the second witness to testify against the now 75-year-old former market trader, who stands accused of some of the most heinous sex and cruelty crimes to come before the courts.
Last week, the court heard how the defendant waged a war of attrition, lasting many years, against two vulnerable young girls who had been abandoned by their parents, subjecting them to almost daily sexual attacks coupled with extreme violence and cruelty.
The alleged perpetrator cannot be named at this stage to protect the anonymity of his victims.
However, he faces a catalogue of 35 related sex and cruelty crimes, including charges of rape, buggery, indecent assault, common assault, and ill treatment of a child.
The court heard how one of the alleged victims may have been attacked as many as 1,500 times, while the other girl – her younger sister – was sexually assaulted on hundreds of occasions. The defendant denies all charges before the court.
All of the alleged attacks, the court heard, took place in the man’s Belfast home and he was in his 20s when the abuse first began. The girls were sexually abused in a number of rooms in the large terraced house, although the vast majority of the attacks took place in his attic bedroom.
“We called him; ‘The bastard in the attic’,” the second witness told the court this week.
And she also told how, fuelled with alcohol and armed with a knife and pair of scissors, she plotted revenge for the years of sexual abuse and cruelty he had forced her and her sister to endure.
The witness recalled how on one occasion a number of years ago, she approached the man’s home late at night.
She told the court: “I was screaming for him to come down and face me. He looked out the window and he saw me.
“I walked up the steps with a knife and a pair of scissors. When he came to the door, I went for him with the knife. He grabbed my wrists. I was shouting. I called him a paedophile. He said : ‘I never touched you’.
‘You’re nothing but a whore, like you’re Ma’, the witness claimed the man shouted back at her.
As the struggle continued in the narrow hallway of the house, other people, alerted by the noise, began to arrive and they tried to pull the pair apart. The witness told the court how her the knife and scissors fell to the floor after they were were forced from her hands.
However, she managed to wrestle her hands free and, spotting the scissors on the floor, she lifted them and tried to launch a second attack.
She testified: “I grabbed the scissors, but he managed to jump into the parlour and he held the door shut with him back against it.”
The said she continued to scream at the man, again accusing him of sex abuse and telling him that at some stage in the future: ‘The shit will hit the fan.’
told the court the defendant allegedly told her no one would believe her above him.
She went on to say how she tried to block out the nightmare of sex abuse and cruelty by consuming alcohol.
“I thought my problems would go away through the end of a bottle. I would go on benders, drinking for three and four days at a time,” she said.
She told the court how she began consuming large quantities of alcohol from 14 years years of age.The abuse, insisted the witness, also affected her personality: “I became rebellious, cheeky and nasty. If there were riots, I’d be there.”
Later the woman told the court how, 11 years ago, she plucked up the courage to tell the man’s family what had happened. She said she had decided to make the move after learning the man was supervising other young children. She attended a meeting where a number of members of the man’s family were present.
“I went into the house and the family were all there.”
The witness recalled how some members of her alleged attacker’s family had difficulty believing what she was telling them, while another demanded to know why she was making the accusations at this time.
“I was crying and I said: ‘When is there a good time?’”
And as the family meeting went on she insisted: ‘He sexually abused me, he mentally abused me and he physically abused me.”
The witness told the court there was an agreement not to mention the matter again as long as the alleged abuser was no longer left in charge of children.
“We made a pact,” she said.
A barrister for the defence accused the witness of making the whole thing up, but she insisted she was telling the truth.
The court also heard from a number of witnesses, who confirmed attending the meeting, although two of them insisted they wanted the matter referred to the police immediately.
On Friday, a police officer from the PSNI giving evidence, recalled how two years ago, he was called to a disturbance outside a Belfast city centre bar. There he found a blonde-haired woman and an elderly man, the accused, with blood on his face. The officer said the man declined to explain his injuries to the officer or assist him with his inquiries.
He later arrested the man on suspicion of rape, he told the court.
The trial continues tomorrow, when it is expected the defendant will take the stand to give evidence