Mother's Day rapist trapped after 31 years

Robert Carpenter pounced on his victim as she walked to work along a quiet footpath in Scunthorpe at 6.30am on Sunday, March 25, 1979.

He forced her scarf into her mouth to stop her screaming and beat her with such force he knocked her dentures out and broke her jaw.

After raping her, he threw the woman over a fence and she was found wandering along the footpath by a member of the public, dazed, bruised, and with her clothing muddy and bloodstained.

Carpenter, who had a history of violence and dishonesty dating back to 1968, was only caught when forensic evidence taken from the victim in 1979 was matched to his profile on the national DNA database, from a sample taken from him when he was arrested for causing criminal damage in 1998.

When he was arrested for the rape on December 16 last year as part of a cold case review, he had only been out of prison for three weeks after serving a three-year sentence for stabbing.

In total he had 23 convictions for 45 offences – including attacking a police officer and biting a nurse.

Sentencing Carpenter to six years and eight months for the rape at Grimsby Crown Court yesterday, Judge David Tremberg told him: "Your victim was walking to work, she elected to walk along a relatively quiet public footpath and it appeared you saw her and attacked her without a hint of encouragement, and subjected her to a brutal ordeal of merciless and gratuitous violence and repeated sexual violation.

"Having battered her you began your squalid sexual assault on her. The level of violence was excessive and gratuitous."

The woman, who was 36, had moved to Scunthorpe from Surrey with her husband seven months earlier and took the cinder track after being told it was a short cut to the town's steelworks, where she worked as a canteen assistant.

In her first police interview she did not describe the attack as rape as she was a Roman Catholic, thought sex outside marriage was wrong and was worried about what her husband might think.

The court heard the couple could not resume a normal sex life for some time after the attack and the victim could not talk about it.

They went on to have a daughter in 1981 and both she and her father were in court to see Carpenter sentenced.

They were accompanied by retired detective sergeant Jean Dunc, who worked on the initial inquiry and said the case still troubled her.

The woman died from throat cancer in 1987, aged 45, and police said it was a "tragedy" she had not lived to see her attacker brought to justice.

Carpenter, now 56 and a grandfather, pleaded guilty to rape, another serious sex offence, and grievous bodily harm with intent at an earlier hearing.

Rodney Ferm, defending, offered no mitigation.

"Apart from the defendant's guilty plea there isn't any mitigation at all," he said. "There isn't simply any for the circumstances of this offence."