Sex attacker who survived Dunblane horror faces life sentence

A SURVIVOR of the 1996 Dunblane massacre faces a possible life sentence for a sex attack on a 76-year-old woman in her home.

Ryan Liddell, 20, was told by a judge yesterday that he would be assessed to determine the “risk your being at liberty presents to the safety of the public at large”.

The case was continued until November, but if Liddell were to be made subject to an order for lifelong restriction, he could be held in custody indefinitely and, if released, would be supervised closely for the rest of his life.

Liddell was five when he was shot by gunman Thomas Hamilton, who stormed into his primary one gym class at Dunblane Primary School and murdered 16 of his classmates and his teacher.

Fifteen other children, including Liddell, another teacher, and a classroom assistant, survived.

In June, Liddell was found guilty of attacking the pensioner, after barging into her ground- floor flat in Dunblane, Perthshire, and tearing off her clothes and saying he wanted sex.

A jury convicted Liddell, of Anderson Street, Dunblane, of assaulting the woman with intent to rape her and to the danger of her life. He was also found guilty of breaking a bail curfew.

Liddell was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder when he was six, a year after being pulled bleeding from the school gym and asking his mother: “Mummy, am I going to die?”

The trial heard that Liddell had suffered sleeplessness and anxiety since he was a child – a condition which in adulthood made him semi-nocturnal.

He had been walking the streets of Dunblane at 4am on 14 June last year when he spotted his victim’s door ajar and went into her home.

He pretended he was her carer and there to give her a shower, before punching her repeatedly and kicking her on the head as she lay on the ground.

He dragged her to her bedroom and said he wanted to have sex with her.

He was forced to flee when the woman’s neighbours, who were alerted by muffled screams, ran downstairs to find her lying in her living-room in a pool of blood.

Friends and family described Liddell’s victim as friendly and outgoing before the attack, but said since the incident she had “deteriorated dramatically both mentally and physically”.

In police interviews, the woman said she thought she was going to die, and that a man who looked like the Devil had wanted to have sex with her.

The defence counsel, Jamie Gilchrist, QC, told the High Court in Edinburgh that Liddell stood convicted of a very serious offence and he did not expect anything other than a substantial custodial sentence.

“He is a young man who has clearly had to struggle with some pretty significant difficulties in his background, but he had managed to carve out at least the beginning of a productive life. Although there have been minor breaches of the law in the past, this dreadful matter was completely out of character.”

The judge, Lord Uist, said there had been a previous incident in which Liddell had entered an elderly man’s home, but Mr Gilchrist disputed any suggestion of “targeting” elderly people.

“Nothing happened [in the other incident]… the matter was regarded as so minor it was not even prosecuted,” said Mr Gilchrist. “I find that hard to imagine if there was any kind of sinister undertone.”