‘We didn’t have sex. He raped me’
A alleged victim of accused serial sex attacker Joseph McCann told a court how she froze in terror after he dragged her from the street at knifepoint to rape her in a five hour ordeal.
The 21-year-old single mother was walking home from a nightclub in Watford, Herts, when McCann, 34, pulled up alongside her in a Ford Mondeo and bundled her inside.
Giving evidence via a video link the woman said she had argued with friends and decided to walk home rather than take the taxi with them.
She had drunk most of a bottle of wine gettig ready and three or four Red Bull and vodkas at the club and said she was feeling ‘quite drunk’ before she left the Prism nightclub.
When McCann stopped she said had her phone in her hand.
‘I was on the phone to someone. I told him to call the police but he didn’t hear me. He didn’t call them,’ the woman said.
‘I didn’t know what he was going to do to me. He had a knife to my neck.
Asked why she didn’t run from the car she said: ‘What if he would have caught me. What would I have done then?’
She said she kept dropping her phone as she tried to use it in the car because she was shaking with fear.
McCann then grabbed it and threw it out of the window of the Mondeo before they drove off.
She wept as she recalled how he put his arm around her so she could not move and forced her into the passenger seat.
‘I felt a knife to my neck,’ she sobbed.
In the car McCann gave her cocaine and got her to drink Malibu before they went back to her flat.
Asked why she did not scream to neighbours for help as she walked to the flat she said: ‘What if i did shout and they didn’t hear me? What if i was left stranded?
‘I was in heels. I couldn’t run. He would have caught me.’
McCann claims she consented to him when they had sex on the bed, but she snapped: ‘We didn’t have sex. He raped me. I didn’t even look at him.
‘I just froze. I didn’t say anything.’
‘He kept saying because I was his girlfriend I had to do what he said.’
By the time they left the flat to drive to her mother’s home they had been together for five hours.
McCann repeatedly told her she was beautiful and him her phone number so they could keep in touch.
The woman told how she had wiped herself with a tissue during the ordeal and tossed it into her son’s room to provide DNA evidence against McCann.
He is said to have claimed eleven victims aged between 11 and 71 in two weeks of ‘depravity’ between 20 April and 5 May.
McCann, of Aylesbury, Bucks, denies seven counts of rape, one count of rape of a child under 13, seven counts of kidnap, one attempted kidnap, 10 counts of false imprisonment, three counts of assault by penetration, three counts of causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity, one count of sexual assault and two of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without their consent.
A 25-year-old woman told police how she smashed a vodka bottle over McCann’s head to escape after she was repeatedly raped and forced to suffer extreme sexual indignities in a 14 hour ordeal.
In a taped police interview played to the jury, the bespectacled woman told in a quiet voice barely above a mumur how she was on her way home in northeast London on April 25 when McCann pulled up in silver Ford S Max.
‘He put his hand over my mouth. He said: ”Don’t scream, stop screaming, don’t make a sound or I will stab you.”
‘Then he said to get into the car.”
McCann looked for a knife but then threatened to smash a vodka bottle into the face of the victim, who thought she was being mugged the court heard.
‘Then when he said strip I realised what was happening,’ she said.
‘I thought he was going to rape me and I thought I need to make sure he does not kill me.’
‘He told me to take my clothes off, I think he was driving when he did that.’
In a ‘dreadful ordeal of shocking depravity and violence’ she was forced to perform sex acts on herself a drink vodka and smoke, the court heard.
Then he made her get into the back of the car and repeatedly raped her, the court heard.
They drove off again and when they pulled up the next time he raped her over the car, the woman said.
On two or three occasions he told her to get dressed as they drove so she could entice another woman into the car.
She told how he also raped her outside a school and urinated into a cup twice and made her drink it.
At one stage McCann took her to a shop to buy more vodka and the assistant noticed how distressed she was.
‘The woman asked me if I was okay. I tried to shake my head,’ she recalled.
But she was too terrified to allow her captor to see her raise the alarm and had to get back into the car with him.
McCann then saw a 21 year-old woman on the street and dragged her into the car too as her sister ran off screaming in Hillcrest Avenue, Edgware.
‘He jumped out of the car and got this other girl,’ she said.
He told the girl not to use her phone and he would slit her throat and drown her,’ the woman continued.
‘He told her to strip and she said: ”Please don’t”
But the girl was then made to perform oral sex on McCann as she sobbed, it is claimed
He then ordered the first woman to perform a sex act on the second in the back of the car.
‘I put my arm and hair in the way to pretend to do that,’ the witness said.
‘Then he told me to do it properly. I said no and he hit me.
‘He kept saying he had someone in the police and that I would never escape him.
‘He started saying more and more to me and the other girl that he was going to kill us.’
When McCann ordered her to find the bottle of vodka she took her chance to escape.
‘I took the big bottle of vodka out of the bag and hit him on the head with it,’ she said.
‘It smashed and I ran away. I ran some builders. I said: ”Help help he’s kidnapping us.”
The two workers in a construction site in Watford came to her as McCann fled, the court heard.
The trial continues tomorrow (fri).
ends
