Rapist apologises for hitting victim in 'leafy Cork suburb'
A 32-year-old salesman who raped and battered a woman in April 2002 in a leafy Cork suburb is scheduled to be sentenced on January 26 by Mr Justice Paul Butler at the Central Criminal Court.
Paul Buckley, of Baker’s Road, Gurranabraher was found guilty by a jury in November of raping and assaulting the woman causing her harm between 10.00pm on April 7 and 2am on April 8, 2002 in what the jury was told was "a leafy suburb of Cork".
The jury of nine men and two women took almost six hours to reach unanimous guilty verdicts on both counts on day seven of the trial after it spent one night in a hotel.
Mr Justice Butler remanded Buckley in continued custody for sentence. He has also certified Buckley as a sex offender.
The now 27-year-old victim told Mr Alexander Owens SC (with Ms Alice Fawsitt BL), prosecuting, that she had been socialising during Sunday April 7 with friends and drank one bottle of Budweiser in each of several pubs after sharing a bottle of wine for lunch with them.
She went that night to the Franciscan Well on the North Mall to hear a band and her friends left before it finished but she assured them she would get home on her own.
She recalled leaving the Franciscan Well but remembered nothing more. The next thing she knew was she was on the ground with a man sitting on her with his legs each side of her body. It was dark and she didn’t know where she was. She could only make out the outlines of trees and a building.
She described how she tried to get up but the man wouldn’t let her. He punched her on both sides of her face and also had a hand to her throat to try to stop her screaming.
When he moved his hand from her throat she screamed again and he rained more punches on her.
"I thought I was going to die. I had to stop struggling for fear he would strangle me,", she said. "I knew I could not get away from him. I stopped struggling and he told me to spread my legs and then he raped me."
The woman told Mr Owens she could not say how long this took because she tried "to believe I wasn’t there". He had told her to stop crying and she tried to cry more quietly.
The woman said he must have left soon after he raped her and she got up "and ran and ran without knowing where I was going". She feared he was still around and would jump out at her.
She described jumping over a wall onto the road and cutting her leg on barbed wire but didn’t notice this happened. Two women came in a car and took her home at her insistence though they wanted to bring her to hospital and to the gardaí.
"It was only when I got home I realised I had no clothes from the waist down,", she said. Her face was swollen "black and blue", she had a black eye, fingerprints on her neck and three parallel cuts on her leg from the barbed wire.
She told Mr Owens she didn’t see her attacker’s face but knew he was about 30 years old and that he had a local accent.
Buckley was traced by gardaí through a notebook found at the scene. One of the pages contained the name, address and telephone number of a Cork woman who confirmed to gardaí she had also written down Buckley’s name and address and phone number on a page from the same notebook.
Buckley, in evidence told his counsel, Mr Patrick McCarthy SC (with Mr Dermot Sheehan BL), that the woman had chatted him up in the early hours of the morning when they came across each other on the street and had consented to "full-on" sexual activity with him.
He told Mr Owens, in cross-examination, that he had not had sexual intercourse with her. Their intimacy, he said, had been confined to "full-on sexual activity" and simulation of sex.
"There’s more to sex than just intercourse. Look up the word "sex" in the dictionary and you will find it means more than intercourse," Buckley told Mr Owens.
He had also agreed with Mr Owens that the following morning he disposed of the trousers he was wearing on the night of the incident but denied that he had done so because he might have left his "calling-card" on them which he was afraid gardaí could find.
He said "the real reason" he dumped his trousers was because he did not want to explain to his mother why they were dirty. "I was 30 years of age and I could not explain it to my mother. I don’t do my own washing,"
He added that he was not a construction worker but a salesman and there was no reason for dirt to be on his trousers. It would have been difficult to explain the situation to his mother.
He denied that she had been drunk and he had taken advantage of her intoxication when he saw her on the street. "She was coherent and she chatted me up," he told Mr Owens.
He also denied that he throttled her after pushing her to the ground in the back garden of a house and threatened to kill her if she was not quiet. He said she had been standing up when he throttled her and punched her "three times with my right hand and once with my left".
"All I have to say is that I am sorry I hit that girl. My apologies, like," he said.
