Drug-crazed murdering rapist jailed for 22 years
Steven Mathieson, 38, was told he must serve 22 years in prison before being considered for parole for what a judge described as “terrible and senseless crimes”.
The car salesman stabbed single mother Luciana Maurer 44 times in a frenzied and unprovoked cocaine-fuelled attack.
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Hide AdHe then called two more prostitutes, aged 22 and 26, to his house in Falkirk, and raped them repeatedly.
The two Eastern European women eventually managed to flee naked into the street as he chased them with knives.
Mathieson’s wife was on a work’s night out and his young son was asleep in the next room when he committed the crimes on 4 December last year.
Miss Maurer – a Romanian national from Medias, Transylvania – was 23 and had a seven-year-old daughter.
As Mathieson wept loudly in the dock at the High Court in Livingston yesterday, his QC Donald Findlay expressed surprise that the criminal justice social work report about his client’s background was not “hugely condemnatory” or “damning in the extreme”.
He said the author had assessed Mathieson as being at low risk of reoffending when he was eventually released from prison.
Mr Findlay said: “Mr Mathieson is an ordinary, everyday, probably slightly boring man who, if he returned to his ordinary, everyday, slightly boring life would be no risk to anyone.
“That fits my belief that the evil that lies behind this is concerned with his use and abuse of cocaine.
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Hide Ad“In any commonsense view, at the time of these offences Mr Mathieson was not in his right mind. The real tragedy from his point of view is he turned to the evil that is cocaine.”
He added: “Sending for three prostitutes to come to his home while his young son is asleep in a bedroom and his wife could come home at any time is an insane thing to do.
“He booked one and then for good measure he booked two more and that in my submission reinforces the whole madness of this episode.”
Judge Lord Bannatyne said Mathieson’s crimes were “wholly depraved”. He said: “This is an appalling case. The crimes you have committed are truly dreadful.”
He said that the only explanation offered for Mathieson’s “terrible and senseless crimes” was that he had taken a lot of cocaine.
“That was a conscious and deliberate act by you,” the judge told him. “You, it appears from the criminal justice social work report, had taken cocaine on many occasions before. That you were under the influence of cocaine is not mitigation.”
In addition to the life sentence, the judge told Mathieson his name would remain on the sex offenders register for an indefinite period.