Cabbie ‘is Night Stalker who raped the elderly over 17 years of terror’

Delroy Grant raped and indecently assaulted victims as old as 89 after breaking into the homes where they lived alone, it was alleged.

The taxi driver conducted reconnaissance of each property then cut off telephone and power wires and removed windows and light bulbs to make access safer and easier.

He struck in the dead of night, wearing a balaclava and gloves to reduce the risk of being recognised, Woolwich Crown Court, in south-east London heard.

Jonathan Laidlaw QC, prosecuting, said Grant targeted mostly women, but two men were also attacked.

He told the jury that despite the “humiliating and degrading” nature of the attacks, his victims often said his manner was “kind and considerate”.

Grant, who is now 53, committed offences which were “far more serious and sinister” than financially-motivated burglaries.

“In what was to become something of a campaign, the defendant was targeting the elderly and the vulnerable in their homes and at night.” said Mr Laidlaw.

“This is why he was to become known as the Night Stalker.”

He added: “The nature and the extent of the sexual acts he committed seems in part to have been determined by the reaction of the individual victim into whose house he had broken into.

“Where he experienced resistance and where his elderly victims refused to be compliant, they tended to be left alone.”

Mr Laidlaw said: “What it was that motivated him to carry out sexual offences on the very elderly and what sort of gratification he could possibly have achieved is obviously difficult if not impossible to understand.”

Each attack was the result of “careful preparation and planning”, and he would go out well-equipped and with a change of clothes ready in his car parked nearby.

Grant, of Brockley, south-east London, denies three charges of rape, one attempted rape, six indecent assaults, 16 burglaries and two attempted burglary at addresses in south London, Surrey and Kent.

Wearing a blue pin-striped suit with shirt and tie, Grant sat listening intently as the case against him was outlined.

Mr Laidlaw said Grant was arrested in November 2009 after he was spotted by a police surveillance team.

Forensic scientists linked him to 12 out of 18 scenes of Night Stalker attacks by matching his DNA.

Although Grant refused to comment in an interview with police, he initially suggested casually that his son Delroy Junior might be responsible.

Then in court documents he made the “quite extraordinary” allegation that his first wife Janet Watson had planted his DNA at the crime scenes.

But Mr Laidlaw said Mrs Watson left the defendant 13 years before the attacks began and before scientists had invented the techniques used. He said the story was an “extraordinary defence” made possible by the “arrogance which characterises his offending and which makes him incapable of facing up to what he had done”.

The case continues.