Woman jumps from Dublin hotel room window after rapist threatens to 'chop her up'

Updated
Snapshot of Dublin
Snapshot of Dublin



A woman jumped out of a Dublin hotel window to escape a convicted rapist who threatened to chop her up.

Robert Melia, 48, from Ballymun, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Monday to charges of false imprisonment, assault causing harm, and making threats to kill at the Caulfields Hotel in Dublin on 19 May 2013.

According to the Irish Examiner, Judge Martin Nolan suspended the last three years of a 10-year sentence on condition Melia be of good behaviour after his release.

Melia has three previous convictions for violent sexual assaults on three separate victims in one month in October 1997. In July 1991, he received a six-year sentence for a rape committed in 1987.

The Mirror reports that his most recent victim told police he tried to strangle her.

He then told her to take her clothes off saying: "I'm going to bring you up the mountains and I'm going to chop you up."

He added: "Get it into your head, you're leaving, you're going to die."

Det Gda McInerney told the court the woman was a vulnerable drug addict who had met him a few days earlier on a city centre street.

In her victim impact report, the mother-of-one said she now suffers panic attacks and nightmares.



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