‘I won’t let it ruin my life’ says serial rapist’s victim, 71
Women is first to tell of ordeal at hands of Joseph McCann
A 71-YEAR-old pensioner, who was abducted and sexually assaulted by serial rapist Joseph McCann, has spoken out about the attack for the first time.
The elderly victim was subjected to a terrifying four-and-a-half-hour ordeal when McCann forced his way into her car as she was loading up her shopping at a Morrisons supermarket in Ramsbottom, near Bury, after attending church.
McCann was jailed for a minimum of 30 years in December when a jury convicted him of 37 charges relating to 11 victims. The youngest was 11-yearsold.
Speaking to the BBC, his eldest victim explained how McCann had appeared at the passenger window and climbed inside the car before punching her in the face when she told him to get out.
McCann drove the woman to an industrial assault where he raped her and threw her phone into a bush.
At one point, she said McCann told her “I’ve got a knife, I killed somebody this morning.”
McCann then lured a 13-year-old girl into the backseat of the car with him and demanded the woman drive them to the motorway.
Explaining how she managed to escape, the woman told the BBC’s June Kelly: “I did say to him that we were running low on petrol, so he said ‘at the next services pull in.’
“I was working out all the time while I was driving, how am I going to get out of this situation? I knew that I would not outrun him, and I knew I had to get to where there would be a lot of people.”
She eventually pulled into Knutsford service station on the M6 where she ran to a group of people and explained she and the girl, who had also got out of the car, had been abducted.
McCann grabbed the car keys from her hands and fled in her car.
Police later caught up with McCann after he picked up two more young girls, who he threatened to ‘chop up with a machete,’ and crashed the car, making off on foot. When he was found that night up a tree in Congleton, Cheshire, he sneered at an officer: “If you had caught me for the first two, the rest of this wouldn’t have happened.” The woman, who is the first of his victims to speak out, told the BBC she wanted to tell her story because ‘a lot of the other victims are not in any state to do it.’
She said: “I’ve had a good life and I’m not letting it ruin my life. They’re all young women and children they’ve got that for the rest of their lives.” McCann’s violent rampage saw him attack 11 victims in Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Watford and London over a period of two-weeks after he was wrongly released from prison.
On the same morning he attacked the 71-year-old, he had also forced his way into a woman’s home before tying her up and sexually assaulting her two young children in front of her.
His eldest victim told the BBC the probation office that made the mistake of releasing him, for which two people were sacked, was ‘understaffed and had low morale.’
They’re all young women and children, they’ve got that for the rest of their lives 71-year-old victim of rapist Joseph McCann