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RAPIST DAD: Fear made girls keep secret for two decades
HE was supposed to love and protect his daughters, but instead he beat them, lusted after them and robbed them of their innocence and childhood.
Physical abuse came first, with medical records revealing that bruising was found on the eldest daughter's buttocks, back and arms when she was just five years old, and on her younger sister when she was only two.
The younger girl spent one of her birthdays in hospital after her dad threw her across a room, breaking her arm.
Medics were told it was an accident from playing, but her records show bruising on her legs, and burn marks.
But the children slipped through the net and went on to lose their childhood in the most unimaginable way.
Even when the girls became young women and began getting pregnant time and time again, giving birth to children with medical problems and having to terminate other pregnancies because of genetic conditions, the authorities failed to pick up on the situation.
The girls were left to endure years of abuse, too terrified of their father to seek help.
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A police investigation was launched elsewhere in the country in 1997 when a relative made allegations. Again, nothing happened.
Recorder Goldsack said questions will inevitably be asked about the authorities, but the father did everything possible to keep his daughters quiet.
A hardened drinker who drank a litre of whisky a day, the dad had a short temper, which one relative described as 'a one-second fuse' and he would 'flip and turn with just a click of the fingers.'
He terrified his children and wife with his domineering and aggressive ways and they would all suffer at his hands.
When they heard him arriving home in his car they would run to their rooms to keep out of his way. If anything upset him he thought nothing of punching and slapping them and even using his belt.
He forced his youngest daughter's face to just a fraction away from the flames of their fire on one occasion.
When the mother and father went out for a night they didn't use babysitters. The children were locked in their bedrooms.
The girls were kept off school if they were showing signs of any of the violence, and if they were questioned they said they were being bullied at school.
Sheffield Crown Court heard harrowing accounts given by both victims to police to describe the first time their father touched them.
The touching eventually turned to sex, and the abuse even happened in the marital bed he shared with their mum.
The dad kept the family isolated, moving around the country, and rarely having visitors.
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Latest sport. If suspicions were ever raised he would move on elsewhere.
As his daughters got older he refused to let them have boyfriends, beating them if he thought they were forming friendships.
The girls were so afraid of their father as they were growing up that they endured their ordeals alone, not even confiding in each other until they bore children from the rapes and the truth began to emerge.
Even when they tried to move away from home to escape his clutches, their father maintained his dominance over their lives, and continued to rape them, even when one moved into her own home.
He repeatedly told his daughters that nobody would believe them if they reported him.
Living in fear of his temper they believed him and stayed silent - keeping the family secret festering away for more than 20 years until it exploded this summer when the victims finally came forward.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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