Serial violent abuser put behind bars indefinitely
TORMENTED by flashbacks and visions of her rapist, a teenage girl prays for the day she is no longer scared.
Her violent abuser – who had previously kidnapped three other people – was yesterday jailed indefinitely.
Michael Shane Lihou, 45, initially refused to enter the courtroom in the High Court at Wellington because he did not want to face media cameras.
Eventually, he did – only to leave again as Justice David Gendall spoke of the serious violence that was part of Lihou’s abduction and rape of a Carterton teenager in July last year.
Lihou maintains his innocence but a jury found him guilty in June of having abducted the 17-year-old and two charges each of rape, unlawful sexual connection, and assault.
Justice Gendall sentenced him to the open-ended term of preventive detention – the last-resort sentence for dangerous offenders.
Lihou cannot be considered for parole until he has served nine years and four months’ jail. If he is paroled he will remain subject to recall to prison for life, the judge said.
The victim has suffered blackouts and has flashbacks. She prayed for the day when she was no longer scared, the judge said.
Lihou’s lawyer, Noel Sainsbury, said Lihou had a ‘‘ghastly’’ upbringing. He was brutalised and neglected from a very early age. He had been planning to write an autobiography.
Prosecutor Ian Murray said the public had to be protected from a man with a well-established pattern of kidnapping and sexual violence against females.
Justice Gendall said the latest victim had known Lihou for a few months. He invited her to his rooms, gave her cannabis and forced her to drink alcohol.
He would not let her leave and assaulted her when she tried to go. She was sexually assaulted and raped. In the early hours, he forced her to walk with him 7 or 8 kilometres into the countryside. He threw her cellphone in a creek.
The ordeal ended nearly a day after she had gone to his rooms, when a police officer and a farmer found them at a makeshift camp.
Lihou had more than 100 convictions, including the abduction and rape of another teenager in 1988, twice kidnapping a Christian woman who had sponsored his parole from prison in 1996, a kidnapping during an escape from prison, and burgling the home of a prison officer he became infatuated with in 2006.
The female prison officer was not at home when Lihou broke into her house but the offence was said to have had sinister overtones.
A man with whom Lihou had stayed in Carterton, David McKenzie, said, after sentencing, that Lihou had said he had spent 26 years in jail but had not told his hosts he had convictions like the latest ones.