THOMAS Stokes and his passenger were her first customers on that night almost two years ago. They pulled up in a Northern registered silver Ford Escort estate car a few minutes after she took up her pitch at Fitzwilliam Place in Dublin on Thursday, December 29th, 1994.
She leaned into the car and told Stokes her price - £30 for oral sex. She was worried about getting into the car with two men. Thomas Stokes assured her that "his brother" would be getting out of the car around the corner. She directed them to a car park in Ranelagh. When Stokes drove past the turn she knew she was in serious trouble.
There is a certain kind of desperation that makes a woman go out on a winter's night, get into a stranger's car and have sex with him for money. For her it was a gnawing need for heroin. She was back on the gear, and back on the streets after an 18 month break.
Before she went out that night she'd had a row with her boyfriend about it. He wanted her to give up the heroin and the night job. She said she needed heroin to "feel normal".
She only offered oral sex and masturbation and would call it a night when she had earned £120. She told the court she loved her boyfriend too much to have intercourse with her clients.
That night Thomas Stokes and the other man spent 2 1/2 hours assaulting her on a lonely bog road on Powerscourt Mountain. They forced her to give both of them oral sex. Then both men raped her.
She told Stokes she had AIDS and asked him to wear a condom. He did. "I was crying and screaming. They told me to shut up or they would bury me. I told them I wanted to get home to my kids and my mother." She said Stokes said to his companion: "Look at her. She loves it."
At one point Stokes took a jack out of the back of the car. She thought it was a gun. It was not clear what he was going to do with it. At some point the used condoms, tissues and a cigarette box were thrown out the window.
Then Stokes drove down the mountain and the two men dumped her out of the car in Rathfarnham. She felt lucky to be alive. The couple who found her said she was "in an awful state". She was rocking back and forward saying: "I never thought I'd see a face again." They took her to the Garda station.
For the next two days Stokes did what he had been doing for most of his life he took to the road. Gardai issued a description; he was dangerous and could be armed.
On January 1st he was arrested on Tivoli Bridge in Cork for a traffic offence, after a night in a B&B. He told gardai he was Anthony Maguire from Newry, but his driving licence had a Dundalk address. Gardai said he was "very convincing", but both addresses were false.
He was given 14 days in Portlaoise jail for giving a false name and was rearrested on his release for false imprisonment, sexual assault and rape of the woman on December 29th and 30th.
A Garda source described Stokes (36) as a versatile criminal. "He has every type of conviction, which is unusual because burglars usually don't branch out." In the 1980s he picked up a teenage schoolgirl on a dark winter's evening near Athy. He took her down a narrow laneway, but was disturbed by a passing farmer. He was convicted of indecent assault and given four years.
Stokes had married his cousin Christina Stokes in 1982, and they lived in Waterford. After he was released from prison in 1987, he went to Britain where he learned to read and write. Stokes told the court that he worked with a travellers' group fighting for equality. He said he preferred to refer to travellers as "Irish tinkers".
Stokes did not strike people as a dangerous man, the Garda source said. "If you were talking to him he's as sweet as pie. He dresses pretty well. He's slick. But when he was around, you had to watch your home and yourself."
Stokes was convicted in Britain of threats to kill and received a sentence for arson. According to a Garda source he had tried to burn his wife and child out of a house after a domestic dispute. It was his trademark, the garda said, and earned him the nickname Thomas "The Burn" Stokes.
In September 1993 Stokes returned to Ireland, after absconding from prison in Britain, and lived on a halting site in Clondalkin, Dublin. By the following summer he had moved to a halting site in Bray, Co Wicklow where the travellers were moved on by a High Court order obtained by a developer.
Much of his defence was based on allegations of conspiracy and racism against him because he was a traveller. Describing the eviction from the Bray site he painted a picture of a war zone with gardai and developers on one side and travellers on the other.
"I saw earthmovers coming from all directions, mothers grabbing children, tears in their eyes. It looked like a war to me. It looked like Soweto, South Africa."
Stokes is writing a book in prison, according to his solicitor. It details his early life. Both of his parents were killed in a car crash on the Naas road. During the hearing he would read parts of the book to the woman - a health worker - who offered alibi evidence for the night of the rape.
He claimed that he left her house in Kildare on December 30th and spent the night, with his brother in Tallaght. Then he said he went to Cork to look for an old girlfriend. He didn't find her and met another woman outside a pub.
His description of their one night stand couldn't be further from his victim's description of the rape. "We were chatting, talking. We were both, I suppose, interested in some friendship for the night. We made love." He said he took out the duvet he kept in the car and they "slept in each other's arms and woke when it was light".
In tortuous detail he described putting two used condoms, some tissues and a Benson & Hedges cigarette box in a plastic bag and taking it with him to a B&B room he rented the next day.
This was the room that gardai searched he said. The condoms and rubbish found at the scene were taken from that room and planted at the scene, he claimed. It was one of the more outrageous in a string of allegations Stokes made against the gardai who investigated the rape in his description of life as a "persecuted" man.
His victim is trying to put her life together again. She says she is no longer engaged in prostitution and has come off heroin.
