A killer rapist who murdered a teenager nearly 50 years ago has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years and 126 days in the oldest double jeopardy case in England and Wales.
Dennis McGrory was 28 when he sexually assaulted, stabbed and strangled 15-year-old Jacqui Montgomery in her home in Islington, north London, in 1975.
The 75-year-old was cleared of murder the following year on the directions of a judge but was finally convicted decades later after swabs from Ms Montgomery’s body produced a one-in-a-billion DNA match.
After a 2003 change in the law on double jeopardy, McGrory’s case was referred to the Court of Appeal and sent for a fresh trial at the Old Bailey.
Sentencing McGrory, who appeared at Huntingdon Crown court via video-link from HMP Peterborough on Friday, Mr Justice Bryan told the killer: “I have no doubt whatsoever that you intended to kill her in your brutal attack on her.
“You put Jacqui through a horrific, violent and sustained ordeal in her own home – a place where she was entitled to feel safe.
“In the decades that followed, you must have thought you had gotten away with your hideous crimes.
“How any man could inflict such sexual violence on a 15-year-old child that had done them no harm beggars belief.
“You have shown not one iota of remorse or compassion for Jacqui or Jacqui’s family.
“You cut short that life and deprived her of that life, and all the things she hoped for in that life.”
