The serial rapist David Carrick sent a photo of his police gun to one victim with the words: “Remember I’m the boss” and sexually assaulted another while her daughter could hear, a court has heard.
The hearing at Southwark crown court came after Carrick last month admitted 49 charges detailing 85 serious offences including rape, sexual assault, false imprisonment and coercive or controlling behaviour.
All crimes were committed while he was a serving Metropolitan police officer, and from 2009 he was assessed as being fit to carry a gun.
The court heard on Monday that Carrick carried out a series of “violent and brutal attacks” using “his power and control” to silence his victims, with the prosecution detailing how his status and police equipment were used in his offending.
Carrick told one victim he was a police officer and the “safest person” she could be with, before luring her back to his home and raping her at gunpoint, the sentencing hearing has been told.
Prosecutor Tom Little KC told the court Carrick engaged in “a systematic catalogue of violent and brutal sexual offending” over a “period of 17 years increasing in frequency … and with an increasing level of humiliation being inflicted”.
In all, he attacked 12 women from 2003 to 2020. Some of the offences took place in London but most were in Hertfordshire. Carrick, 48, lived in Stevenage. One woman was attacked between 2017 – the year the Met vetted Carrick as fit to serve – and 2019.
The harrowing details of the attacks, and the recurring theme of using his status as a police officer to help entice women before terrorising them into silence, adds to the culpability of the Met – which failed to spot the danger he posed despite repeated warnings.
Little told the court Carrick’s status as a police officer – and the equipment provided by the Met to protect the public – featured in his offending. “He told her that she belonged to him and that she must obey him. He would call her ‘his whore’ and ‘his prostitute’.
“He threatened her with his police baton and sent her a photograph of his work-issue firearm saying: ‘Remember I am the boss.’ He told her that she should obey him and that if she did, he would give her an amazing life.
“The defendant constantly criticised [her] telling her that she needed to go to the gym and that she was ‘fat’ and ‘lazy’.”
Carrick also had a camera system at the home where he and the woman lived. “He would watch her whilst he was at work … When [she] was sitting in the lounge she heard the defendant calling her ‘lazy’ through the device,” Little said.
This woman was also locked 10 times in a tiny understairs cupboard as punishment. Little said: “She was made to strip naked. They did not communicate whilst she was in the cupboard, he would stand outside and whistle at her as if she was a dog.”
In one attack on another woman, with whom he was in a relationship from 2016, the victim’s child heard Carrick’s attack on her mother. The court heard he seemed to gain “pleasure” from the sounds of his victims suffering.
After meeting on a dating app, on which Carrick said he would pay her £1,000 a month to be his “slut”, she moved in with him. Little said: “As the relationship developed, he became more and more aggressive in bed. He would say ‘who do you belong to?’ and she had to answer to him saying that it was him.”
Carrick’s offending did not stop when the woman’s daughter had friends staying over.
Little told the court the Met officer demanded oral sex: “She begged him not to do it that night as she knew that her daughter and friends would hear. However, the defendant just carried on and would not stop.
“He took pleasure from her gagging and struggling to breathe and told her that as he was doing it, she felt humiliated. Her daughter told her afterwards that she had heard what had taken place. Indeed, in her [victim impact statement] the daughter makes clear that this was not the only occasion that she had heard and was aware of her mother being raped by the defendant.”
Wearing a dark suit and blue shirt, Carrick kept his head down as the prosecutor detailed his offending.
Another woman attacked by Carrick, one of two police officers he assaulted, explained why she kept quiet about her ordeal. Little told the court the woman said it was “shame to a degree”.
Little told Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, who will decide Carrick’s prison sentence: “[Carrick] frequently relied on his charm to beguile and mislead the victims in the first place and would use his power and control – which the prosecution say is linked in part because of what he did for a living – to stop them leaving or consider reporting him.”
The first victim whose case Carrick pleaded guilty to was attacked in 2003.
The woman was 20 and was on an evening out with friends in a London bar when she met Carrick. He claimed he lived nearby and was having a housewarming party and invited her back. Little said: “The defendant told [the woman] that he was the safest person that she could be with and that he was a police officer.”
Back at the one-bedroom flat, the woman tried to leave after a while, but Carrick would not let her. Little added: “He grabbed her by the hair and put his hand round her mouth and dragged her backwards. He threw her on the bed. He held her down.
“He grabbed her arms. He had taken his shirt off. She bit his arm and he put his hand behind the bed. He searched for something and then put a black handgun to her head and said to her: ‘You are not going.’ She froze. The prosecution does not contend that it was a real firearm. [The woman] could not say whether it was or not.”
Little said the rape was prolonged and included explicit threats: “It carried on for some time. He put his hands around her throat and said he was going to be the last thing she saw.”
Once the woman left Carrick’s flat she went to hospital where she was found to have suffered extensive injuries, including bite marks, bruising and internal bleeding. She had bruising on her ankles from being dragged.
She did not report the attack to police at the time, with a nurse telling her she may be better off forgetting about it and moving on to avoid being disbelieved.
The crown said the offending – among the worst of any sex offender in modern times – merited a life sentence, to which counsel for Carrick – Alisdair Williamson KC – agreed, saying his client was an example of “how good and evil dwelled in one skin”.
The decision for the judge is the minimum term Carrick should serve before being considered for release. Williamson agreed Carrick should receive a life sentence, but said that should be less than 40 years. He added his client was remorseful and was not asking for “mercy”.
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
