Man attacked sex workers
AMAN attacked two sex workers in a week – attempting to strangle one and slashing the other in the throat with a knife.
Andrew John Hurlow then went to police days later following a public appeal for information, and tried to claim he was the one who had been assaulted, telling officers “that b***h stabbed me”.
The 52-year-old had been due to stand trial for unlawful wounding and affray, but changed his plea to guilty on the day of his court case after being told his victims – whose identities are protected by a court order – had come to court to give evidence against him.
At his sentencing, John Hipkin, for the prosecution, told the court Hurlow’s first attack had taken place late in the evening of August 11 last year, when he had approached a woman outside the Duke pub in High Street, Swansea, and the pair had agreed to sexual activity.
The pair walked to a nearby park in Hafod “where she felt uncomfortable because he walked behind her”.
At the park, after being unable to perform a sex act, Hurlow asked his victim to turn around when “she heard him going through his pockets and she turned around to see him producing a piece of string, which he put over her head and neck,” said Mr Hipkin.
“She began to protect her neck and started to panic at that stage, and attempted to pull away. She dropped to the floor and managed to escape.”
Exactly a week later, on August 18, he encountered his second victim begging outside a shop in the city.
The pair walked to a secluded area near the former Vetch Field, where the woman produced a blanket for the pair to lie on, at which stage she felt an arm around her throat.
Mr Hipkin added: “She felt a blade and the body of a knife, akin, she thought, to a Stanley knife, and feared at that stage for her life. She heard the defendent laughing at her and she struggled and fought him off. She felt a low hollow cut along her throat that caused blood to drip.”
She then ran from the scene, and encountered another man, who called the police on her behalf.
Following a police appeal for information, Hurlow, of Croft Street in Dyfatty, attended a police station four days later, when he made his claim he had been victim of an attack, during which he had received a cut to his hand, and that his “attacker” had been in possession of the knife.
But he was later identified by one of his victims, and a cigarette butt found at the spot of the first attack forensically linked Hurlow to the scene.
The court was told that Hurlow had “many convictions over many years”, including receiving a nineyear jail sentence in 2007 after he and others had attacked a security guard and covered him in brake fluid “no doubt to frighten him”.
He also received a community order in 2017 – which he had breached by his two attacks – for possession of a knife and making threats to his partner and mother of his child.
Mitigating, Paul Hobson said he had pleaded guilty and there had been a lack of serious injury.
Hurlow was given a four-year sentence, with an extension of one year, for the unlawful wounding causing GBH, plus a further year for affray, to run concurrently, making five years.