His descent from Asbo teen to serial predator
GIVEN the depraved nature of his offending, it would be easy to assume that Joseph McCann had a deep-rooted hatred of women. With a history of violence and criminality, he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work.
Yet, as far as anyone knows, he had never exhibited any violent sexual tendencies against the opposite sex before his appalling rape spree. Detective Chief Inspector Katherine Goodwin, who led the investigation into McCann, said: ‘In my view it (his sexual depravity) just comes out of nowhere. It is quite unprecedented.’
So what on earth was the trigger for his eight rapes and other terrible crimes?
McCann has never offered an explanation and declined to give evidence during his harrowing trial. However a clue may be that following his release from prison in July 2017, after serving nine years for aggravated burglary, he started seeing Sharon Rumley, a mother of at least four children.
It’s not known how they met but it seems to have been a whirlwind romance and the relationship quickly became serious. Within a month she had announced their engagement.
‘Happiest woman alive right now, seeing my baby today and he asked me again to marry him,’ she wrote on Facebook.
One response to the news was that Miss Rumley had better seek a divorce first because she was married to a man called Lee Hocking.
The wedding never happened, there was no time: McCann was sent back to prison in January 2018, having burgled a house in Renhold, Bedfordshire, a few days after his release.
Maybe he was expecting Miss Rumley to be there waiting for him upon his release this February. If so, it seems he was disappointed. Miss Rumley, a friend has told the Mail, recently had another baby with another man – and would have become pregnant around the time of McCann’s release.
Did this news lead to his violent disposition being redirected toward women?
WHEN she was contacted by the Mail, Miss Rumley declined to comment, nor would members of her family. Tellingly they only said that they knew ‘ what the McCanns are like’. As will become clear, their caution was understandable – the McCanns are a wellknown criminal family.
While the motivation for his sex attacks will always remain speculation, McCann’s violent and reckless nature was already well established across the country.
He first came to the attention of the authorities in 2004, aged 19, in two separate but equally crazed rampages.
After stealing a Saab from a garage forecourt in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, in the January of that year, he led police on a terrifying high-speed chase. He tore through a residential area of Borehamwood at speeds of up to 70mph, mounting pavements and driving on the wrong side of the road.
At one point during the rampage, he stopped the vehicle, put the engine into reverse, and repeatedly rammed the police car following him.
The chase ended when he crashed into a garden, writing off the car in the process. He sprinted off and evaded capture.
Just two months later, however, McCann pitched up in Blackpool, where he went berserk one night on the promenade. After being refused entry to the Heaven and Hell nightclub, he yelled ‘I’ve got a gun in the car and I’m going to get it’. He got into his Vauxhall Vectra and drove it at door staff.
Another high- speed chase ensued, with a police helicopter deployed as McCann was pursued along the M55 and M6. On reaching Preston, he abandoned his car, broke into a property and terrified its residents before fleeing and finally being captured with the help of a police dog. There was yet more. In the dock at St Albans Crown Court in July 2004, having just been sentenced by the judge to five years and two months for his crimes in Blackpool and Borehamwood, McCann’s violent spree was by no means over.
Despite being handcuffed, he aimed a kick at the toughened glass partition around the dock, shattering it into pieces. In the ensuing melee, police cars raced to the court and he was overpowered by security staff.
The following month it emerged that an anti-social behaviour order barred McCann and his brothers Sean and Michael from Beswick in Manchester. The order had been imposed because the family had been terrifying their neighbours in the area for years.
Three years later, in 2007, McCann was out of jail and back in the bosom of his family in Wilstead, Bedfordshire.
And what a family they were: also living in the semi-detached property in the cul-de-sac was his father Richard ‘Paddy’ McCann, the head of the family, his mother, Margaret, and several more of their children.
Irish-born Margaret and Richard, who was born in Scotland, had been married in a Roman Catholic ceremony on December 1973, at the Church of St Francis in Manchester. She was 18 and he was 20.
On the marriage certificate, Richard’s occupation was put down as scrap metal dealer but the family’s main job seemed to be terrorising the neighbours.
They were living on a caravan site in Islington, north London, at the time of McCann’s birth in 1985 and led an itinerant life.
They moved many times around the country as he was growing up, living variously in Watford, Bedford, Aylesbury and Manchester.
Different areas, at different times, but always the same story – the McCanns were the archetypal family
from hell. Paddy McCann was known and feared as a gangsterish type with a penchant for getting into rows with other travellers.
Anyone who had the misfortune to come into contact with Paddy and Margaret would give a hollow laugh at the story the pair put about when they pitched up somewhere new – that they were landscape gardeners.
As one villager, who crossed paths with them when they were living in Wilstead around 2007, puts it: ‘They were out and out gangsters, thieving and robbing. Talk of them doing landscape gardening is rubbish – they were criminals.’
Another neighbour said: ‘Paddy McCann was a gangster who thought he could run the village.’
But his son Joseph was even worse. Within months of his release from jail, on December 27, 2007, McCann committed a particularly nasty burglary on a frail pensioner.
He broke in via the side door of the house of the 85-year-old man living alone in Cotton End, Bedfordshire.
Luton Crown Court was told he produced a weapon and told his terrified victim: ‘Give me money or I will knife you.’
Unknown to McCann, CCTV had been installed in the house following other burglaries, and he was captured on film.
At his trial in 2008, details of McCann’s private life emerged. He was in a relationship with a woman, with whom he had a child and a second was on the way.
His defence lawyer sought sympathy for him by pointing out he had been unable to be present at the birth of his first child because he had been in prison and would miss the birth of his second child if he was jailed again.
It didn’t wash. McCann was found guilty of aggravated burglary and sentenced to a minimum of two and a half years behind bars and handed an indeterminate sentence for public protection.
This meant he was considered a danger to the public and that – before being released from prison for this or any other offences in the future – he would have to go before the Parole Board.
The rest of the family left Wilstead
and moved north to Luton soon after McCann was jailed, according to neighbours.
The reason seems to be that Paddy had a fight with another traveller. With McCann behind bars and unable to offend, his brother Sean took up the mantle and embarked on a rampage of his own.
In March 2015 he was visiting Bedford Prison, presumably to see his brother, when staff noticed he appeared to be drunk.
When he left, they alerted the police, who pursued Sean’s car through Bedford town centre. They halted the chase after deeming it too dangerous because he had mounted a pavement, forcing pedestrians to leap for their lives.
Sean continued, however, to drive like a madman, colliding with seven vehicles on one street before crashing into two others waiting at a crossing.
His car then hit two more vehicles, forcing one on to the pavement, where it hit a pedestrian. He tried to flee, but was apprehended and sentenced to 20 months in jail in October 2015.
SEAN, who had a history of mental health issues and drug abuse, was found dead in his cell in March 2016. He had taken his own life.
Less than a year after this family tragedy, in July 2017, McCann was released after nine years behind bars. Under the terms of his sentence he should have been assessed by the Parole Board before any decision was taken on whether to release him. This did not happen.
According to neighbours he had by now split up with the mother of his children, who had stopped him having access to them. He went on to meet Sharon Rumley.
What sparked his vile rape spree will never truly be known. As DCI Goodwin said yesterday: ‘We did try to determine whether there was some sort of trigger for this behaviour but unfortunately we have nothing more solid than speculation.’
Given those attacks, and his history, there will, doubtless be few who do not hope that – this time – he stays in prison, for life.