A jury has convicted the owner of an escort agency of abducting a woman and her four-year-old son and repeatedly raping the woman for hours.
Michael Murray (42), Killiney Oaks, Co Dublin, was found guilty of carrying out what the prosecution described as a “terrifying ordeal of sexual depravity”.
Murray had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to two counts of sexual assault, two counts of rape with a make-up pen, attempted vaginal and anal rape, oral rape and aggravated sexual assault on February 12th and 13th, 2010 in a Dublin city apartment.
He also denied child abduction, threats to kill or cause serious harm, false imprisonment, stealing a bank card and stealing cash from two ATMs.
After a trial that lasted 22 days, the jury of nine men and three women took just under six hours to return a unanimous verdict of guilty on all counts.
Neither the victim, who is not an Irish national and who lives here with her husband and two children, nor anyone from her family, was in court.
Det Garda Michael Donlan told Dominic McGinn SC, prosecuting, that Murray’s 20 previous convictions include aggravated burglary, burglary, robbery and possession of firearms.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy remanded Murray in custody, where he has been since his arrest a day after the attack. He will be sentenced in October.
During the trial, the State claimed that the man was acting out a sexual fantasy based on watching too much online pornography when he subjected his victim to a “terrifying ordeal of sexual depravity”.
Murray lured the woman inside a city-centre apartment owned by his wife's family by convincing her that an elderly woman needed her help. It was shortly before 5pm on a Friday and the victim was walking on a city centre street with her son.
During the trial, after viewing the closed-circuit television footage of the woman and her son going into the building with him, the victim said: "Even now I'm thinking: why would I agree to go with him?"
Once inside Murray took the woman’s phone and demanded she have sex with him. He then took her son to another room while she broke a glass bottle against the window to try and raise the alarm. She said that when he returned she held a piece of the bottle to her throat and threatened to kill herself unless he let them go.
This appeared to frighten him and he asked her to put down the glass. By this stage her throat was bleeding.
Murray, who said he was snorting the “head shop” drug mephedrone, started to beat her and threatened to kill her son.
“I had no way out so I had to do what he said,” she told the jury, before detailing a series of sexual acts he performed on her.
She said that at one stage he made her change into a white-collared garment, pretend to be 10 years old and call him “daddy”.
He became enraged because he became impotent and was unable to have full sexual intercourse with her. At one point the woman’s son came into the room and was upset. Murray told her to take the child to a different room and to come back to him.
He tied up the woman before leaving the apartment at one stage. He then returned and continued to beat and sexually assault her.
He later gave her a pill to "relax" her and she felt very drowsy afterwards. He put her in the bath and left the house but she managed to keep herself awake by biting her lip so she could find her son. CCTV footage from the building showed Murray driving away with the boy at about 10 pm.
Murray left the boy on a footpath near the Luas line in Smithfield, Dublin, and drove off. A taxi driver picked the child up shortly after this and brought him to a Garda station.
Murray left the apartment a second time at about 5am.
The woman said she then searched the apartment for the boy before she began to throw plates out of a window to catch people’s attention. She also got a kitchen knife in case the man returned.
A passer-by saw the commotion and called gardaí. She was brought to hospital and gardaí told her that her son was unharmed.