Unmasking a sexual monster
A MONSTER jailed for 27 years for raping and torturing various women he lived with over two decades, has been sentenced to a further four years in prison. And now for the first time we can reveal the monster’s identity.
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A MONSTER jailed for 27 years for raping and torturing various women he lived with over two decades has been sentenced to a further four years in prison.
And now for the first time the Central Coast Express Advocate can reveal the monster’s identity — as Graham Thomas Sales — after successfully applying to a Downing Centre District Court Judge to lift a suppression order on his name.
Appearing at Downing Centre District Court from Silverwater Jail via video link, a grotesquely overweight Sales said nothing as he was sentenced after pleading guilty to six counts of sexual and aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, common assault and two counts of threatening the officer in charge during a fiery outburst in the witness box last year.
Judge Penelope Wass said “sexual sadistic intercourse” was part of Sales’ “sexual repertoire” and his actions motivated by “cruelty”.
“The hurt to the victims and thereby the community is insidious, widespread and longstanding,” she said.
Today’s sentence comes after the 54-year-old was given 36 years jail, with a non-parole period of 27 years, for the physical, sexual and psychological abuse of women he lived with between 1988 and his arrest in 2014.
He was found guilty of 21 offences, many depraved and sadistic in nature, including raping women with household objects, forcing them to eat their dinner off the floor and hogtying them and putting them face down in the bath.
Sales was due to face another trial in March but pleaded guilty two weeks before it was to start with his defence barrister John O’Sullivan telling the court it was to “save the victims the trauma” of reliving their abuse.
HOW THE VICTIMS CAME FORWARD
The court heard while many of the offences happened in the 1980s and 90s, many of his victims had been too afraid to come forward and lived in fear for much of their adult lives after Sales made threats to kill them.
However Sales was charged and remanded in custody for another unrelated matter in May 2014.
With Sales safely behind bars, witnesses — mostly ex-partners of Sales or their relatives — who had been reluctant at best, began to slowly feel safe enough to share what they knew.
And perhaps more alarmingly, what they had experienced behind locked doors under the manipulating control of a sadist.
JF told how Sales had isolated her from her family and when she finally rang her sister to ask her to contact police, he walked in and heard the call.
When officers arrived, JF was hogtied in a cupboard and could hear Sales answer the door and nonchalantly tell police she had “gone out”.
Before long a pattern of abuse became blatantly apparent to police.
Sales needed three people in his life — someone to drive him around, a woman for sexual favours and another woman to look after his children. Sometimes that would be one and the same woman, other times it would be a mistress, or worse, one of the women’s children.
His modus operandi was calculating and cold. He would find a vulnerable woman, like a poor single mum, or one woman he stumbled across in a park who was contemplating suicide at the time; befriend them, win their trust and then get them under his roof.
After a honeymoon period of a few weeks or months in which Sales would be doting, charming and loving he would become more aggressive, violent and controlling.
One former partner would later tell a court when was pregnant Sales told her “today’s my birthday … I want my son to be born on my birthday” before smashing a wooden bed and hitting her in the stomach.
The woman went into early labour that night and gave birth to her son five weeks prematurely.
Another woman told a court Sales flew into a rage when she bumped into an ex-boyfriend while at an RSL club together.
He later sat her down and threw bread knives at her calling her a “slut” before beating her unconscious.
When she woke up Sales taped the woman’s young daughter to a bed before forcing the woman to go to a phone box and call her mother to report an intruder had broken into their house to explain her injuries.
In another incident Sales forced the woman’s daughter to stab her in the head with a fork and also sexually abused the daughter.
A court heard Sales and his partner at the time made one young woman, who was staying with them, stand on thumbtacks, sleep in the laundry and shave her head.
Sales and his then partner made the young woman stay up all night massaging their feet, rammed her hands in a door and burnt her legs on a heater.
The court heard the doors were deadlocked so she could not escape.
“I’m your king. You are my slave you’re never going anywhere. You’ll never escape me,” he told the young woman after raping her.
In a victim impact statement one women described how her life was ruined after her and her single mum moved in next door to Sales in Mitchell Drive at Bateau Bay.
“Being raped takes away your choices,” her statement read.
“I never got to experience my first sexual encounter like most women do because I was a child.”
In ailing health, Sales will be 81 when he is eligible for release in May, 2045. The Judge also added another year to his parole period, bringing his total sentence to 41 years with a non-parole period of 31 years meaning the monster of the Central Coast will almost certainly die where he belongs, in jail.