Serial rapist admits committing ‘horrific’ sexual assault in Victoria, Australia 40 years on

A serial violent sex offender has been brought to justice almost 40 years after raping a woman and rendering her unconscious by bashing her head on a garden bed.

Robert Barry was 22 years old when he committed the violent rape at Traralgon, in Victoria’s Gippsland region.

After the August 1984 attack, Barry left town and moved to Western Australia with his partner and child, where he continued on a path of sexual violence.

Now aged 61, Barry is serving a 12-year prison sentence for offending against three young girls in WA.

This includes the deprivation of liberty and sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl in 1991, indecent exposure to a 16-year-old that same year and the aggravated sexual assault of a 15-year-old in 1993.

He changed his surname from Johnson to Barry in 1991.

Barry faced the County Court via video link from a Victorian jail cell on Tuesday after being extradited from WA to face justice for the garden bed attack.

He started running towards a 24-year-old woman, who had just left her friends at a bar in Traralgon, about 10.30pm on August 25, 1984.

She was walking towards a tree when she noticed he was running at her on the grass.

The woman waited under the tree for him to leave, and once she thought it was safe she started walking, but Barry grabbed her from behind.

She was frightened and froze as Barry put his hand over her mouth, pinned her arms to her sides and dragged her into a garden area.

“Don’t look at me,” Barry told his victim.

He began to rape the woman, and when she struggled and tried to get away, Barry pushed her down and repeatedly bashed her head against a wooden sleeper on the garden bed.

She lost consciousness, and when she came to she ran to a nearby house, where the occupants called police.

The following morning, a friend visited the woman at her home and said she looked completely unrecognisable, with bruises and cuts covering her face.

Forensic evidence, including swabs, were taken from the woman and items of clothing were seized, but none of it could be tested until improvements in DNA technology in 2012.

Barry was found to be a match, and he later pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated rape.

Prosecutor Andrew Grant described the offending as “everyone woman’s worst nightmare” and said Barry tried to avoid being identified by his victim through the way he committed the rape.

“Minding your own business, going home from a social night on a weekend, and then worrying about this sort of thing,” Grant told the court.

“It’s clearly objectively grave - it is horrific offending,” Judge Nola Karapanagiotidis replied.

Defence barrister Jo Swiney said Barry, who was working as a furniture removalist when he was arrested in 2016, accepted he would face additional time in prison.

She said he was a “heavy drinker”, and claimed he committed that and the other sex crimes while alcohol-affected but had not re-offended since the mid-1990s, as he’d addressed the alcohol abuse.

Judge Karapanagiotidis indicated she would hand Barry a substantial term of imprisonment.

He will be sentenced on November 23.