Black cab rapist pleads guilty to four additional sex attacks at Old Bailey

By Emily Pennink and Henry Vaughan20th June 201920th June 2019News EnglandCourts / Justice, London, News England, Rape, Sexual Abuse

Black cab rapist John Worboys has pleaded guilty to drugging four more women.

The 62-year-old, who now goes by the name John Derek Radford, targeted women who hailed his cab and drugged them in order to sexually assault them.

He was jailed in 2009 for sex assaults on 12 women and at an Old Bailey hearing on Thursday, pleaded guilty to a string of further offences relating to four more women.

Appearing via video link from Wakefield prison, Worboys, wearing spectacles and a light grey and green shirt, pleaded guilty to two counts of administering a stupefying or overpowering drug with intent to commit rape or indecent assault.

He also admitted two counts of administering a substance with intent to commit a sexual offence under the Sexual Offences Act.

The first victim was picked up in Worboys’ taxi after leaving a bar.

All the women made their allegations to police in early 2018, but the offences dated back to between 2000 and 2008 in London.

At his first trial at Croydon Crown Court in 2009, jurors were told Worboys picked up his victims in London’s West End and plied them with champagne laced with sedatives on the pretext of celebrating a lottery or casino win.

Worboys, originally from Enfield, was convicted of 19 offences including one count of rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 drugging charges.

He was jailed for at least eight years but was told he would be held in custody as long as he was deemed a danger to the public.

Last year, the Parole Board ruled he should remain in prison citing his “sense of sexual entitlement” and a need to control women.

Police believe Worboys may have carried out more than 100 rapes and sexual assaults on women in London between 2002 and 2008.

At an earlier hearing in the latest case, prosecutor Jonathan Polnay said: “The allegation is that in 2000 or 2001 (the first victim) left a bar in Dover Street and hailed a taxi. The prosecution case is the driver of that black cab was this defendant.

“He told her he had won money on the horses and was celebrating and claimed he had been a stripper with the Chippendales.

“He offered champagne and invited her to celebrate. She agreed.

“This defendant pulled over on a side road off the A40 served an alcoholic drink in a plastic cup, which she drank. That is her last memory that evening.

“She woke up the next day naked with her clothes left in a trail on the way to her bed.”

The prosecutor continued: “In the late 2000s when there was considerable publicity about this defendant when he stood trial for a number of sexual offences she recognised the defendant as the taxi driver who had picked her up and in due course on December 13 2018 she picked him out in an identity parade.

“It is therefore the prosecution case this defendant did in fact administer a drug of sorts that caused her to lose consciousness.

“All his previous convictions relate to a very particular, identical modus operandi – picking up women in taxis, claiming he had won money gambling, offered alcohol laced with a form of sedative.”

Mr Polnay added the second complainant was a university student in London in 2003 when she was targeted after leaving a nightclub on New Oxford Street in what was “an identical method not only to the first count but a number of previous convictions and allegations three and four”.

Victim ‘completely in shock’ over guilty pleas

A victim of black cab rapist John Worboys said she was “completely in shock” after he admitted drugging four more women.

The woman, who can only be identified as DSD, was one of two victims who won a landmark High Court ruling to reverse the decision to release the 62-year-old from prison last year.

He was jailed indefinitely for the public protection with a minimum of eight years for sex attacks on 12 women in 2009.

Worboys pleaded guilty to further offences against four more victims who came forward last year at the Old Bailey on Thursday.

DSD said: “I was completely in shock that he pled guilty after everything he has put his numerous victims through over the years.

“Whilst I can’t help being cynical about his motives, I am pleased that his victims have been saved the trauma of a court case.

“My thoughts are with each and every victim today and the hope that we can now put this behind us and finally rebuild our lives.

“I would also like to express my utmost admiration of the victims’ courage to finally speak out to ensure this dangerous criminal is brought to justice.”

Worboys was never prosecuted over the allegations made by DSD, but for a range of “sample” offences.

But he was found by a High Court judge to have committed offences against her in a ruling on her case against the Metropolitan Police, and Worboys settled a claim she and 10 other women made against him for £241,000 without admitting any wrongdoing.

DSD’s solicitor Harriet Wistrich, the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice charity, said: “It is clearly a relief that Worboys is now admitting to offences he has been charged with.

“This is a vindication of the judicial review brought last year which sought to highlight a much wider level of offending than that he was previously prepared to admit.”