Jailed for life, knife thug who left City worker in a coma
A SADISTIC ‘predator’ who left a newlywed City worker in a permanent coma after a random knife attack has been jailed for life.
Barry Peacham stabbed Qingqing Rao in the head and mutilated her before grabbing her handbag near her home as she returned from work.
Miss Rao, a 29-year-old business analyst, remains in a permanent vegetative state and is unlikely ever to recover.
Peacham, 26, attacked her as she walked through a park on her own just after 9.45pm on February 13. He was so confident nobody had witnessed the attack that he returned to the park with his girlfriend’s mother’s dog later that night.
Miss Rao was left lying in the park in East London with serious brain injuries and stab wounds until a passer-by spotted her and called 999 shortly after the attack. Her husband Ansgar Wenzel spoke movingly of how his partner of ten years and wife of just six months had kissed him goodbye the last time he saw her.
‘ She was cruelly taken away from me the day before Valentine’s Day – a few days before our ten-year anniversary – for nothing more than her handbag and its contents,’ he said in a statement. ‘I wi l l always remember how she smiled and turned her head laughing in the morning of February 13 when she left for work; the goodbye kiss is one I will always cherish.’
Days after the attack Peacham, who has previous convictions for robbery and possessing offensive weapons, bragged to his friends: ‘I stabbed her multiple times.’
But he denied involvement when he was linked through ‘circumstantial evidence’ to what police called a ‘crime of pure evil’.
Sentencing Peacham to a minimum of nine years, Judge Anne Molyneux said Miss Rao’s mother described feeling a ‘permanent shadow’, adding: ‘Your actions have destroyed her life and that of her family.’
Peacham, of no fixed address, was cleared of attempted murder but convicted of wounding with intent and robbery after a trial at the Old Bailey last month. Judge Molyneux told him: ‘This was a brutal, sadistic and cowardly attack on a lone female making her way home from work – you were a predator and you showed no mercy.
‘The violence you used went way beyond any violence that might have been necessary for a robbery. As her mother describes it, “a permanent shadow has been planted in my heart”.’
Miss Rao came from China to the UK in 2002 speaking hardly any English. Within three years, she had finished five A-Levels and obtained a place to study mathematics at Imperial College.
She was treated in hospital for many months after the attack near her home in Barking and Dagenham and is now receiving 24-hour care at a nursing home.