Ipswich man attempts to overturn rape conviction after trial hears stepdaughter’s heartbreaking account of abuse

An Ipswich teenager’s shocking confession to a classmate landed her stepdad in jail, court documents have revealed as the man now makes his bid to overturn his conviction for raping her. GRAPHIC

An Ipswich teenager’s shocking confession to a classmate landed her stepdad in jail, court documents reveal, as the man now makes his bid to overturn his conviction for raping her.

An Ipswich man was jailed after his stepdaughter made a shocking confession to a classmate during a schoolyard squabble.

The stepdaughter wrote a heartbreaking letter to her mother that same day, after the man’s sick abuse was finally exposed, telling her she “just wished [she] spoke up sooner or screamed or it never happened”.

A jury found the man, in his 50s, guilty of rape back in 2022 after a trial in Ipswich District Court.

The man was sentenced at the time to eight years in jail, but he recently attempted to overturn the conviction.

The man argued the jury could not have been satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that actual penetration had occurred, according to appeal documents published in March 2024.

The documents reveal how the man’s stepdaughter had first confessed what he had done to her during an argument with a friend at school.

That friend later recounted to police how it all came about because she had called the girl a “sl-t”.

The girls had been taken to speak with a school mentor, and the friend told the mentor that the girl had claimed to have had sex with boys her age.

But the girl responded “no I haven’t, but my stepdad like rapes me and stuff, like at night time,” according to the friend’s recount to police.

Police had attended the school that same day after the girl had additional conversations with the mentor and the school guidance counsellor, the court documents reveal.

The girl had felt uncomfortable speaking to her mother out loud about what had happened, so she wrote a letter instead – which was also given to the jury as evidence.

In the letter, the girl recounted how the man’s offending had first taken place.

“I would hear my door creak open,” the girl wrote.

“I would think it’s my mum so I would pretend to be asleep but it was [the man].”

“I thought [the man] was checking on me but, wow, I was wrong … [The man] grabbed my left hand, held it with his hand and do a hand job movement … This happened a few times.”

The girl claimed the man had sexually abused her at least 15 times over the course of a semester, including at least one instance of unprotected penetration.

She said it happened on multiple occasions after she asked him to crack her back, and that it would “like go the same way, it would be the same routine”.

“I have never asked for a back crack since,” the girl wrote to her mother.

“I just wished I spoke up sooner or screamed or it never happened.

“But this is the truth as much as I remember.”

The court documents note that DNA testing had identified the man’s sperm on a section of the girl’s bedroom carpet.

A jury found the man guilty in September 2022 of both rape and maintaining a sexual relationship with a child.

During the appeal hearing, the man pointed out some inconsistency between what the girl had written in the letter to her mother and what she had told police.

But the presiding justice David Boddice ruled the inconsistency was not significant enough to have forced the jury to reject the girl’s evidence.

“A consideration of the complainant’s evidence as a whole supports the conclusion that it was open to the jury to be satisfied of her reliability and credibility,” Justice Boddice states in the appeal decision.

“There was an inherent consistency in the complainant’s account to police, in her preliminary complaint to the mentor and in her handwritten document to her mother.”

The man will be eligible for parole in September 2026.

Originally published as Ipswich man attempts to overturn rape conviction after trial hears stepdaughter’s heartbreaking account of abuse