Judge Sentences Australia’s Ariel Castro to 19 Years Jail for Abduction, Rape of 25-Year-Old Woman He Stalked for 13 Months (VIDEOS)
If Libya has former dictator Moammar Gaddafi and the U.S. Ariel Castro as poster boys for men who abduct and rape their victims, their Australian counterpart, Michael Allen Pilgrim, has been found guilty and sentenced on Tuesday to at least 19 years prison term.
Victorian County Court Judge Michael Tinney found Mr Pilgrim guilty of abducting and raping a 25-year-old woman who was a former sex worker. Like his counterparts in Libya and the U.S., Mr Pilgrim likes absolute control over his victim so he locked her inside a sound-proof cubby house in an isolated Victorian location.
To sound-proof the room, he attached mattresses to the wall.
Mr Pilgrim, it turned out, has an obsession on his victim because he stalked her for 13 months before he abducted her. It was not only the 25-year-old victim he stalked, but other women with whom he had no relationship.
To get his victim, Mr Pilgrim, 34, used fake identities, wore a fake beard and used a Taser and chloroform when he tracked the subject of his lust to a friend's house in July 2012.
He tasered the man who answered the door and then kidnapped the woman and brought her to Drouin, located 100 kilometres southeast of Melbourne, to a house that he rented, using a fake name.
The house had two eye-bolts and a soundproof cell that he called cubby house, where he repeatedly raped his victim for five days.
He was arrested in Sydney 10 days after he left the victim outside a hospital in Warragul. What was surprising was that during the trial, the court learned that Mr Pilgrim was a model child and student until he went into social isolation when he was at university.
He hoped that the victim would develop the Stockholm Syndrome wherein she would eventually have feelings for him.
The judge sentenced him to 23 years and six months in prison, with a non-parole period of 19 years. Mr Pilgrim pleaded guilty to the charges of false imprisonment, abduction, stalking and four counts of rape.