Ahop man guilty of 10 charges — but not of rape

A FORMER sweet shop owner has been cleared of raping a woman in the rear of his store in Forfar while her young son was in the front of the shop.

But Richard Beech was found guilty of attacking the woman weeks later to the danger of her life after putting a pillow over her face and his hands round her throat at a house in the Angus town.

The woman told the court: “I actually thought he was going to kill me.”

The woman said she eventually managed t o push him off “with force”.

She said she was “really petrified” following t he attack by the former soldier.

Beech, 33, who has previously been convicted of going AWOL from the army, was acquitted of four rape charges i nvolving t wo women and a further allegation of i ndecent assault following a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh.

But he was found guilty of 10 offences against six women in a catalogue of violence between 2008 and last year.

He was also convicted of assaulting Detective Constable Craig Kelly at Dundee police HQ on March 3 last year.

One woman, a 35-yearold mother of three, told the court she’d gone to Beech’s home in Dunholm Road, Dundee, to finish a relationship with him in 2013 when she was pregnant.

She said they got into an argument in a bedroom and Beech locked the door.

She said he started shouting and t ook her phone and car keys and hid them and pushed her on to a bed. She said: “I was scared for my baby.”

She said he picked up a hammer and was going to hit her with it. She added: “He told me he was going to kill me.”

Another woman, who had met Beech through a dating website, at first thought he seemed “like a nice guy” but later found he got really angry and told her he knew how to build bombs.

Beech had denied a string of charges and said of the allegation that he raped a woman in Forfar in January last year: “I never had sex with her at all in the back shop. I wouldn’t have sex in the workplace.”

The trial j udge, Lady Scott, deferred sentence on Beech until next month and ordered a background report on him. He was detained in prison.