Raped mum opens up about twenty-year wait for justice while attacker partied with stars
Lynda Donnelly's rapist is finally behind bars two decades after attacking her in her own home whilst her children slept next door
A MUM who was raped eight times in her own home has finally got justice after her attacker was jailed twenty years later.
Lynda Donnelly, 45, was brutally raped in her house in South-East London in 1996 as her two young children lay sleeping in their bedrooms.
While she recovered and struggled to cope with the aftermath. Her attacker, Pierre Antoine Bate, moved to the US and embarked on a successful career as a music producer, partying with celebrities and film stars.
But he has finally been brought to justice by the Met police's cold case team, and this summer was found guilty of eight counts of rape and sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Lynda fought for years to keep cops looking for her attacker as they made a catalogue of embarrassing mistakes. She learnt that vital evidence had been destroyed, and at one stage was even told her case didn't exist.
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Bate, now 42, broke into her family home in Thornton Heath and told Lynda his "mates" were with her children, who were sleeping in their rooms just seconds away. He told her to stay silent or he'd hurt them, before blindfolding her and raping her eight times in a sickening attack which lasted four hours.
Lynda recalled the sickening ordeal to the . She said: "I think I’m dreaming. He’s looking out of my window but slowly turns round. Looks at me. I realise I’m not dreaming. I try to make a beeline for the door, but he takes two strides and beats me to it.
"He grabs me and says: 'I’ve got mates in with your kids.' I try to get away. He grabs this arm from behind me."
"My brain’s racing. I’m thinking: 'How do I get out of this?' Even if I get out of this room, there’s no way I’m going to run out of the house and leave my kids."
Lynda went to the police straight after the attack and officers collected evidence from her home, including bedding, a dressing gown and a cigarette packet with Bate's fingerprint.
But this crucial evidence disappeared and was never recovered - and as the months wore on Lynda slowly began to lose hope that police would ever find her attacker. Cops failed to make a single arrest and Lynda was shunted between officers for years.
In March 2008, an episode of Crimewatch featured an episode on the Minstead Rapist - and although it came out the crimes were committed by someone else, Lynda thought the attacks were similar to her own.
She phoned the hotline, but her calls were never returned. And when she called Police Complaints, she was told her case didn't exist.
However, her luck changed when a cold case team turned up on her doorstep in 2011.
They said they'd found Lynda's statement and wanted her to sign a release form for the DNA evidence collected after the rapes.
Lynda told the : "I said: “I’ve been told for years that this case doesn’t exist. Now suddenly you’re asking me to sign a release form.”
"I was getting angrier and angrier. The officer said they’d found my statement.
"The next time she came she said: 'Do you know a guy called Pierre Bate?'"
He was finally arrested the same year after advanced DNA techniques meant officers could match the semen taken from Lynda's body in 1996 to Bate's.
Cops applied for Bates to be extradited from California, where he was staying in the US.
He was finally convicted last month after just an hour of deliberation from the jury.
Lynda found out that Bates had spent 26 months in Jail in the US for a sexual assault he'd committed just a year before he attacked her - and in 2014, he had been arrested for charges of sexual assault and attempted murder.
She is now hoping that any other victims will now feel safe enough come forward.
She told the : "I’ve done 20 years in my own prison. Now, I have a chance of a new beginning."
"That’s why I hope that if there are any other women who have been attacked by him, they’ll come forward. There needs to be an end to this."
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