A Sydney paedophile who murdered a man before raping his young stepdaughter will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The NSW Supreme Court had jailed Jeffrey John Hillsley for 30 years for murdering a friend and then kidnapping and raping the man's 10-year-old stepdaughter.
Hillsley had previously served jail time for sex offences against three young girls.
He had been out of jail for less than two years when he bludgeoned his friend to death with a hammer at the man's Campsie home in 2003.
Over Christmas that year, Hillsley had stayed with the victim, who cannot be named, and returned to attack the 54-year-old as he slept on New Year's Eve.
He had sexually assaulted the man's stepdaughter during his earlier stay and, after the murder, abducted her at knifepoint and repeatedly raped her.
The girl managed to escape 16 hours later.
Hillsley, 54, pleaded guilty to murder, kidnap and four counts of aggravated sexual assault.
The case prompted calls from the NSW opposition for the "chemical castration" of offenders like him, and the crown appealed against the inadequacy of his minimum 25-year jail term.
Obviously, the crown won their appeal. In handing down the life sentence, the appeals judges said There are some crimes which are so wicked that a sentence less than a life sentence cannot adequately reflect the community interest in retribution and punishment. In our view, this murder is a crime of this kind.
This case raises some important issues. The most obvious being WHY was this paedophile free to murder, kidnap and rape when he'd already kidnapped/assaulted three little girls. Further to this, when released from prison on those charges, the ACT government issued a 'warning' to their NSW counterparts saying Hillsley was very likely to reoffend and extremely dangerous.
Yet he was allowed to savagely rape and murder.
Another major issue here is that we do not have publicly accessible sex offender registries. This is NOT a privacy issue, it is a safety issue. The majority of civilized human beings would much rather compromise a sex offender's privacy than a child's safety.
These laws simply MUST be changed to protect our children from monsters like Hillsley.
Please click here for a list of state and federal politicians who need to hear what we're all thinking:
Lenient sentencing and lack of publicly accessible sex offender registries is unacceptable.
