Women were betrayed by the police, courts and politicians
Officers said Worboys made more than 100 attacks ... but they charged him with a fraction of them
DUBBED the “Black Cab Rapist”, John Worboys is one of the worst serial sex offenders in modern British legal history.
For years he evaded capture, waging a campaign of terror against his female passengers.
Police later estimated that Worboys – still only 60 but due for imminent release after just eight years in jail – was responsible for more than 100 attacks on women, whom he drugged and sexually assaulted in his taxi.
But the case is notorious not just because of Worboys’ offending. Police had bungled, mishandled and ignored numerous complaints made by women that should have led to Scotland Yard catching him far earlier.
As long ago as 2002, a woman had first gone to police to complain of being assaulted by a black cab driver. Five years later, Worboys would be arrested on suspicion of rape, only to be released and the case dropped. In the next seven months, he went on to attack a further 29 women.
Eventually, officers searching his car found a “rape kit” including miniature champagne bottles, sleeping pills and gloves.
Worboys, a former stripper, would tell his passengers – picked up late at night in central London – that he had won the lottery or else at a casino and then show them a bag of cash as proof. He would offer them champagne and invite the women to celebrate with him. The champagne was laced with sedatives and Worboys would then carry out his attack.
Time and again, however, officers failed to take seriously complaints by women, whom they had dismissed as being too drunk to recall events.
Scotland Yard apologised for its handling of the case. John Yates, then the Association of Chief Police Officers’ national lead for rape investigation, insisted lessons needed to be learnt.
“We need ... to reinvent our response in the way that we did in relation to homicide after the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence,” he said.
When Worboys was brought to court in 2009, he was only tried on one charge of rape along with five sexual assaults and one attempted sexual assault. He was also convicted of 12 charges of drugging his victims over an 18-month period.
The trial came at a time when Scotland Yard was under fire for its handling of sex offences and officers were happy to brief the media that he had, in fact, been the perpetrator of potentially hundreds of assaults.
Mr Justice Penry-davey, the trial judge who is now deceased, thought he had a way of keeping Worboys, then aged 51, in prison for a very long time despite a single rape conviction. His “indeterminate” sentence – ordering that he must serve a minimum eight years in jail – appeared a tough one.
Worboys’ numerous victims must have felt reassured that the serial rapist would not be released for many, many years. The truth has proved somewhat different. Victims, who were let down by the police at the time, now feel betrayed again. Without keeping many of them in the loop, the parole board decided that Worboys was safe to release back into the community. Indeterminate Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences were introduced by the Labour government in 2003 but led to complaints that thousands of offenders were being left to fester in jail with no prospect of release. David Cameron’s government scrapped them in the face of growing political pressure and in anticipation of a 2012 European Court of Human Rights ruling that they were a violation of the human rights convention.
The judgment has no direct bearing on the Worboys case. But there is no doubt among many experts that authorities became aware of the need to empty jails of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences who had gone past their minimum tariff. Worboys fits that category.
Harry Fletcher, of the campaigning charity Victims Rights campaign and a former leader of the probation trade union Napo, said: “It seems very odd to release Worboys. He is almost certainly being recommended for release to help get rid of the IPP backlog.
“My source told me that in the run-up to Christmas 2016 hundreds of IPP prisoners were let out and almost all of them were subsequently returned for breaking the conditions of their parole.”
‘He is almost certainly being recommended for release to help get rid of the IPP backlog’