Rapist Eoin Berkley gets 14 years jail for attack on Spanish student last year



A 25-year-old man who abducted a teenage Spanish student from Dublin city centre and raped her repeatedly over a 21 hour period has been jailed for 14 years.
Eoin Berkley of Hampton Wood Way, Finglas, Dublin admitted raping the girl at the Irish Glass Bottle Company site, Pigeon House Road on three occasions between July 15 and 16, 2017.
This morning Mr Justice Michael White at the Central Criminal Court Mr Justice Michael White said the crimes were premeditated and the nature of the rapes were particularly degrading.
The judge said Berkley’s threats to kill the victim were “blood curdling”. He noted there were 19 separate incidents of violence or threats of violence during the ordeal.
He imposed concurrent sentences of 14 years for each rape offence and said he was taking into consideration the threats to kill, sexual assaults and false imprisonment.
Mr Justice White backdated the sentence to July 31, 2017 when Berkley went into custody and imposed a period of three years post release supervision. He stated he had to take into account Berkley’s tragic history and his mental health difficulties and said reports handed into court made grim reading.
Berkley smiled during the hearing and stretched and appeared to chuckle when the sentence was delivered.
The court heard evidence that he was mainly sleeping rough at the time and frequently came to garda attention for public order situations which raised concerns for his mental health.
A month before the abduction and rapes a garda inspector in the Dublin city area directed Berkley’s detention under the Mental Health Act. He was seen by a doctor who deemed him fit to be released.
The date of the abduction, the victim was out in the city centre on a Saturday afternoon when she met Berkley, who told her he lived on the beach and invited her to see where he lived.
The then 18-year-old had come to Ireland two weeks earlier to improve her English and was staying with a host family in Dublin. She agreed to go with Berkley but he brought her to a derelict site near Sandymount where he had a number of tents pitched.
Once inside the tent his mood changed, he pushed her to the ground and grabbed her hands. She told him he was hurting her but he laughed and told her she was stupid and that he had “done this before”.
She left the tent but Berkley dragged her back in. He tied her hands up behind her back using a dog leash and told her he had previously killed six people and was going to kill her.
He repeatedly tried to strangle her and and at one point he picked up a small saw and told her that if she didn’t stop struggling he would cut her hands off.
She begged him to kill her in the least painful way possible and he gave her some tablets and he then put some black gloves on. She took the tablets and fell down and he began abusing her.
Over the hours that followed, Berkley raped the woman on three separate occasions. On the Sunday he told her he wasn’t going to kill her until Monday.
He told her that if she tried to run away he would hit her on the head with a rock. He told her that he’d stopped having feelings about people since the age of ten and said he had cut the paws off household pets.
The victim escaped when Berkley took her down to the beach and he fell asleep. In the meantime the family she was staying with in Dublin and her parents in Spain had raised the alarm when she failed to make contact on Saturday evening.
On escaping, the victim rang her father, telling him she was running from a man and told him: “I’ve being kidnapped. I’m going to be killed”. Her father told the court this was the worst phone-call a father could ever get.
The victim told gardaí that she was terrified and knew if she tried to escape she had to be successful.
“I knew that I would have only one real chance to escape. He had total control of my life over these days. I was terrified,” she said.
The court heard that medical tests found morphine, codeine and cannabis present in her body after the attack. She suffered bruising to her wrist, arms, legs and neck.
In a victim impact statement read into court by counsel, the woman said that she had to take medication for months after the rape in case of infections. She said she thought she was going to be killed during the attack and she is now afraid to sleep in the dark.
She said she thinks about what happened every day, saying: “I was afraid, I did not want to be afraid”.
Berkley’s 25 previous convictions include unlawful possession of knives and a realistic firearm and threatening and abusive behaviour.
After the hearing last week Mr Justice White adjourned sentencing to today.
He said that the victim was violated in a horrendous way and that there was a collective sense of shame that somebody visiting Ireland had suffered in such a vile way.
Defence counsel, Michael Bowman SC told the court that his client went into foster care at the age of four as his mother had psychological problems which were compounded by alcohol. At the age of 14 his foster care situation broke down because of his own behavioural difficulties and he was institutionalised at Ballydowd, a facility for “unruly youths”.
Counsel said that after leaving Ballydowd he had lived in flux mostly in homelessness.
Two days after Berkley’s detention under the Mental Health Act his older brother rang a garda station and said Berkley needed to be detained again under the Act. Gardaí told him there was no basis for his detention and advised that he seek medical care.
While he was in custody Berkley used his own blood to write the words “I’m so sorry” on the walls of a prison cell.