A 59-YEAR-OLD man has been jailed for ten years after raping a woman in a park just five hours after meeting her.
Colin Ford had denied raping the 27-year-old woman in Whyteleafe Recreation Ground on May 18 last year.
But he was convicted at Guildford Crown Court last Thursday after a nine-day retrial.
At the original hearing in December, the court heard Ford met his victim, from Whyteleafe, in the Oxted Inn after she had had an argument with her partner.
The pair chatted after Ford offered to buy her a drink, which she declined.
The woman got increasingly drunk during the evening, prosecutor Alexia Durran told the court.
And she had only hazy memories of accompanying Ford and a friend of his to two other Purley pubs, the Jolly Farmers and the Foxley Hatch.
Miss Durran said: "She recalls feeling 'very dead and vacant'.
"Then she recollects being on the grass in the park, and Colin Ford was having sex with her. She remembers it hurt and said to him 'you have to stop'.
"He told her 'it's fine' and carried on."
The prosecutor added: "It is slightly surprising that if it was a consensual encounter, she would send a text to her partner's mother shortly afterwards saying 'I need your help now'."
In a CCTV interview played to the court, the woman said of Ford's earlier demeanour in the pub: "He was pleasant and polite. He was like a friend's dad having a drink in the pub. I didn't feel any threat because of his age."
But Miss Durran concluded: "The defendant took advantage of a drunk and vulnerable young woman, and raped and sexually assaulted her."
The court heard that Ford told police he had consensual sex with the woman.
He claimed they had been holding hands in the pub, and she had said she knew somewhere quiet they could go.
The defendant said she had kissed him, and had taken her jeans down in the park.
The original jury failed to reach a verdict last December and a retrial was ordered.
Concluding last week, the new jury found him guilty of one charge of rape but was discharged after failing to reach a verdict on another charge of rape and one of sexual assault.
Ford, of Fernhurst Road, Addiscombe, was placed on the sex offenders' register and also received a sex offences prevention order, banning him from taking any female who was not aware of his conviction in a vehicle .
