I’M JUST GLAD HE
THE former wife of a serial sex attacker who raped her 900 times has told how she narrowly escaped death at his hands.
Kathleen McMurchie said: “It is sheer luck that he didn’t kill me or someone else. He is a psychopath.”
Last month, Brian McTaggart, 53, was found guilty of sexual and physical abuse against 18 victims.
He was convicted at the High Court in Glasgow of raping three women, indecently assaulting teenage girls and boys and physically abusing other women and teenagers at addresses in Dundee between 1980 and 2001.
Kathleen, who has waived her right to anonymity, was brutalised by McTaggart for six years between 1983 and 1989.
When she met him, she found him funny – “the life and soul of the party”.
After a year together, when she was three months’ pregnant, they married.
His abuse began the day after their wedding and continued unabated in the years to come.
On their first full day of marriage, they were in the living room when he ordered her to bring him tea.
She laughed, thinking he was joking, but he told her: “You belong to me now. You do what you are told.”
When she refused, he dragged her by the hair, through to the bedroom, threw her on the bed and raped her.
When he had finished, he stood up and told her: “Now make my f***ing tea.”
Kathleen said: “There had been no sign that he was a violent man.
“I was in shock. I couldn’t believe what had just happened.
‘I had been raped and was black and blue. It seemed unbelievable to me.”
As she sat sobbing, McTaggart told her: “Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Days later, he raped her again in what marked the beginning of a prolonged campaign of violence.
That same week they married, he lifted her off her feet and laughed as he held her over a four-storey balcony.
She said: “I looked down and thought I was going to die. It was terrifying.
“Then, when he felt like it, he put me down and beat me.”
When McTaggart went out, he locked Kathleen in the house. She was imprisoned with no hope of escape.
As well as raping her at least twice a week, the brutality and psychological torture was relentless.
When she was seven months’ pregnant and having a bath, he came home, plugged a hairdryer into an extension cable and dangled it over her head.
He taunted her, saying: “Look what
I used to lock myself in the toilet and stare at the razor blades
KATHLEEN McMURCHIE