The black-cab driver John Worboys has lost his appeal against the two additional life sentences he received in 2019 when more victims of the serial rapist came forward.
The 63-year-old was jailed indefinitely in 2009 for public protection with a minimum term of eight years after being found guilty of 19 offences involving attacks on 12 women, the earliest in 2000.
A 2018 decision to release Worboys was reversed by the Parole Board after a widespread public outcry and prompted other victims to report attacks. He was subsequently sentenced to two additional life sentences for attacks on four more women, with a minimum six-year term.
At a hearing in London on Wednesday before the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett, and two other judges, Joanne Cecil, representing Worboys, argued the six-year minimum term was excessive.
She also argued that the judge who sentenced him in 2019 was wrong to impose a life sentence because he was already serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection, meaning he cannot be released until the Parole Board concludes he no longer poses a danger.
Burnett, however, said there had been no error in Mrs Justice McGowan’s approach to sentencing Worboys in 2019 and that the minimum term was not excessive.
Giving the court’s decision, he said the sentencing judge had been confronted “with a total of four offences over a protracted period, in the context of much wider offending dealt with by the crown court in 2009, and in circumstances bristling with aggravating factors”..
Worboys, from Enfield in north London, who has changed his name to John Derek Radford, appeared in court over a video link from prison, wearing a blue jumper and glasses.
Police believe Warboys committed 105 sexual offences against women, using his cab to pick up victims before drugging them with alcohol laced with sedatives. In 2019, the court heard he had confessed to a psychologist that he plied 90 women with alcohol, drugging a quarter of them, after being inspired by pornography. He admitted fantasising about his crimes since 1986, motivated by a “hostility towards women”.
One of the victims of the offences for which Worboys was sentenced in 2019 was picked up by the cab driver in 2000 or early 2001 after an evening out at a wine bar in Soho. Worboys claimed he was celebrating a win on the horses before pulling into a side road off the A40 and giving her red wine. The court heard that was her last memory before waking naked in bed the next day at her home address with her clothes laid out in a trail.
Another victim, a university student in north London, was picked up with a friend by Worboys after a night out clubbing in central London in 2003. Reaching their home, the woman agreed to have a drink with Worboys but her friend left. After giving her “something fizzy”, Worboys drove to Paddington Basin where she recalled he appeared “in her face”, possibly after kissing her. She later remembered being back outside her house, lying on the floor of the cab.
The Parole Board decision to release Worboys was overturned by the high court in March 2018 after two of his victims challenged the decision. In November of the same year, the Parole Board overturned its own decision, deciding he should remain in prison after noting his risk and “sense of sexual entitlement”. The Parole Board’s then chair, Nick Hardwick, lost his job over the affair.
