Bristol man jailed for alleyway rape

Two men were jailed today for raping a young woman as she walked home after a night out.

Terrence Bray, 27, from Bristol, and Leon Rock, 23, from Lewisham, London, attacked their victim in a dark alleyway in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, in the early hours.

Rock was sentenced to 10 years in prison and Bray to nine years for what the judge at Luton Crown Court described as a "particularly serious case of rape".

The two men were staying in a caravan park outside the town at the time of the incident on May 25 last year.

They spent the evening drinking in pubs in the town. Bray had taken cocaine and ecstasy, the court was told.

Their victim, a woman in her 20s, had gone to two pubs in Leighton Buzzard with her friends that night.

She left before 2am but realised she did not have enough money for a taxi and so decided to walk back to her parents' house where she was living.

A stranger at the taxi rank offered her money for a cab but she turned it down, believing it morally wrong to take his money.

To get home, she had to walk through an alleyway, where Rock and Bray spotted her.

Judge Jeffrey Burke QC, sentencing, told them: "You saw her and targeted her as prey."

They pinned her against the fence and covered her mouth to stop her screaming. Bray raped her first, then Rock did the same.

They searched her bag and when they found it contained very little, they made it clear they wanted more.

The woman persuaded them not to do anything else at that time but to accompany her home, where she told them she would give them laptop computers, among other possessions.

When the three of them arrived at her door, the men forced her to hand them her mobile phone to prove she would return.

But when she got inside, she screamed to her mother about what had happened and the two men fled.

They were eventually tracked down after police traced the use of her mobile phone and examined footage from a neighbour's CCTV camera that was trained on the entrance to the alleyway.

Bray pleaded guilty to the rape on March 5 at Luton Crown Court while Rock was convicted by a jury on March 16 at the same court.

In her victim impact statement, the woman said had been a "happy, carefree and bubbly" person who was looking forward to going to Australia. But, she said, she changed overnight.

She said in the statement: "I felt physically sick for a month afterwards. I was smoking and drinking excessively and not able to sleep."

She said she did not feel confident enough to go to Australia after what Judge Burke described as the "dreadful ordeal".

He said: "You two fit young men targeted a single young woman and attacked her in an alleyway in the dark when she was taken by surprise and completely helpless."

Rock was handed a longer sentence for failing to show the remorse Bray was credited with showing.

Bray was also sentenced to 12 months in prison for fraud, to run consecutively to his rape sentence.