Scarborough man named as 1992 knifepoint church rapist

Borgers, 41, pulled the woman, in her 40s at the time, off the street and down an alleyway before he subjected her to a horrific ordeal on waste ground in Stotfold, Bedfordshire, in October 1992.

He was arrested last year after a DNA sample he gave when arrested for a minor offence in Yorkshire matched one obtained from the rape scene, which had been put on the national database when it was launched in 1995.

Judge Richard Foster, who jailed Borgers, of Napier Crescent, Scarborough, for seven and a half years last Friday, today overturned a restriction barring his identification for legal reasons after an appeal by the Press Association.

Borgers was jailed at Luton Crown Court, where he hung his head and sobbed in the dock when it was disclosed he told the devout Christian woman “Don’t make any noise or I will slit your throat”, several times during the ordeal, which lasted more than five minutes and left her bloodied and bruised.

Judge Foster told him: “I can think of no greater violation of a fellow human being than what you did to that lady on that Sunday evening.

“This rape took five minutes. That is a long attack. Five minutes must have seemed an eternity.”

Speaking after the hearing, detective inspector Liz Mead, from the Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire major crime unit, said the victim was pleased with the sentence.

“For the victim, this is the day she has waited for for 20 years,” she said.

“She has close friends and family and she has her faith, that is how she has come to terms with it.”

Borgers had pleaded guilty to a charge of rape at an earlier hearing.

His victim was in court to watch him being jailed last week.

The court heard he grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her face to muffle her screams for help.

He dragged the woman to a quiet spot before raping her, even asking her if she was enjoying it.

The court heard that she became frightened he would kill her afterwards.

“I became extremely frightened, wondering what he would do to get away,” she said in a statement read to the court. “Then he said ‘don’t make any noise or I will slit your throat’.” But instead of further injuring or killing her he ran off into the darkness.

Timothy Clark, defending Borgers, said his client had been going through a difficult phase of his life at the time he committed the rape, using drugs and alcohol and coping with difficulties in his parents’ marriage.

“At the time he was abusing drugs and alcohol,” he said. “But since then people who know him and know what he was accused of, and his admissions, speak highly of him.

“There is deep shame and remorse. My client knows he is to be punished and in fact he welcomes it.

“There have been 20 years which my client has had to think about what he did. He is now a different man.”

But Judge Foster criticised Borgers for claiming he felt remorse but only pleading guilty when the case came to court, offering no comment when interviewed by police after his arrest.

“The remorse of 20 years might have been better demonstrated by a full and frank admission at that stage,” the judge said.

After the hearing, a Bedfordshire Police spokeswoman said: “At the time, no-one was charged with the offence and it remained a mystery - albeit one detectives were determined to solve.

“The case had been repeatedly reviewed over the intervening years in an effort to find the attacker, most recently two years ago when it was picked up again by the Cold Case Team at the Beds, Cambs and Herts Major Crime Unit.

“A sample of semen was found at the time and stored until eventually science moved on sufficiently for there to be a full DNA profile extracted from this during one of the reviews held a few years ago.

“However, the profile did not match any existing person on the nationwide DNA database until August last year, when Bedfordshire Police suddenly received a call to say a match had been found with a man who had just been arrested by North Yorkshire Police.

“Borgers, now living in Scarborough, had been arrested for a minor drugs offence and the routine DNA sample taken as he came into custody had been matched with the unknown Stotfold rapist’s sample on the database.”

Ms Mead added: “This case is one of a number that over the last three or four years has been solved with the help of improvements in forensic science.

“We’ve been able to conclude some cases going back 25 or 30 years and I hope it gives encouragement to victims of crimes past and present.”