Child rapist sent down
Crimes were‘abhorrent’
A child rapist from Bannockburn who preyed on underage girls in a string of sex attacks more than two decades ago was jailed for 12 years last week.
Kenneth McKenna targeted two girls from the ages of 11 and 12 and made threats to try and prevent them revealing the abuse he inflicted on them.
A judge told McKenna at the High Court in Edinburgh: “The crimes were, on any view, abhorrent.”
Lord Glennie said: “This litany of sexual assaults was compounded by you, in effect, threatening your victims.”
The judge told him: “I am satisfied in this case there is no realistic alternative to a custodial sentence.”
Lord Glennie told the rapist that he would remain on the sex offenders’ register indefinitely.
McKenna (57), formerly of Randolph Crescent, earlier denied abusing and raping the girls between 1982 and 1996 at addresses in Stirling and Bannockburn.
But a jury at the High Court unanimously found him guilty of five charges of indecency, indecent assault, attempted rape and rape involving the victims.
He was acquitted of a further charge of rape against a third girl when she was aged 15 between February 1982 and February the following year.
One of the women was sexually abused by McKenna when she was aged between 12 and 14, between 1982 and 1985.
She considered confiding in her mother about the abuse inflicted on her by McKenna but added: “I was scared. I was really frightened.
“My dad would have ended up in jail because my dad would have went off on one.”
The woman told the court McKenna had sex with her more than three times when she was an underage child. She said: “I would say ‘no’ and then I would just freeze.”
The woman said she had told McKenna that he could not do this to her but he carried on.
“He wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t speak. Just ‘Shoosh, stay quiet,’” she said.
The woman said she had never confronted McKenna over what he had done but she eventually reported it to the police.
She said: “It’s 30-odd years and I kind of buried it in a closet way, way back.”
McKenna raped his second victim from the age of 11 in 1991 and told her it would be their secret. He told her that no one would believe her if she tried to reveal what had happened.
Defence solicitor advocate George Pollock said McKenna had “health issues”, had undergone surgery and was awaiting further treatment.
Mr Pollock said: “Clearly the offences are serious and there is nothing I can say to mitigate the offences.”
The court heard that McKenna continued to protest his innocence over the crimes the jury convicted him on.
In April, people living in the area of McKenna’s former home in Randolph Crescent staged a protest. Placards reading ‘Get the beast off our streets’ and ‘If you tolerate this then your children could be next’ were on display while chants explicitly calling for his removal from the area were aimed at the property.