RELIEF AS EVIL RAPIST GETS LIFE
A SICK rapist who preyed on old women began a life sentence this week and a community expressed its relief that he was finally off the streets.People in the Westbury area had been horrified when details emerged of the twisted attack on their 74-year-old neighbour.
She was tied to a chair in her own home and repeatedly raped after her mother, 93, had been tied up in another room.
But townspeople praised the life sentence handed out to 49-year-old Anthony Joyce.
The mayor of Westbury, Cllr Bill Braid, said: "It is always a shock when something like this happens in a small community but people have a real sense of satisfaction, like I have, that he has been dealt with." Joyce, of Neville Close, Salisbury, was convicted at Bristol Crown Court on Monday on two counts of rape, two of false imprisonment and one of burglary.
The jury took less than an hour to convict Joyce of the offences, which took place in the Westbury area in 1999.
After the verdict Det Ch Insp Norman McKeaveney, who headed the three-year investigation into the attack, said: "I'm absolutely delighted with the result.
"Anthony Joyce acted with extreme callousness in this attack on a 74-year-old woman and her 93-year-old mother.
An offence of that nature defies belief.
What motivates an individual to do that I just don't know." Sentencing Joyce to life imprisonment, Judge Carol Hagen called the incident 'the most harrowing of crimes' and praised the bravery of the two elderly victims.
As soon as the verdict was announced the jury heard that Joyce had struck three times before and had been sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 1984 for the rape of three elderly women, one in her 90s, in Bournemouth.
Joyce conned his way into the home of the two women by posing as a telephone engineer, a trick often used in distraction burglaries.
He contacted them by phone on June 3, the day before the attack, telling them that it might be necessary to come to their house.
He telephoned them again the next day and arranged to call on them at 2pm.
When he arrived at their home he was dressed as a workman and was allowed into the house, where he then threatened the women with a knife before tying the 74-year-old to an upturned armchair and raping her several times.
West Wiltshire community safety officer, Pippa McVeigh, said: "This was a particularly awful and distressing incident and it is a relief someone has been apprehended."
