Devon might be one of the safest places to live in the country but it has its fair share of sick, violent and depraved criminals. Many of them pass through the dock at Exeter Crown Court on their way to seriously long jail sentences.
They include murderers and sexual offenders who have committed the worst crimes. Drugs gangs and other violent criminals can also receive huge sentences. Some will never come out alive due to their age.
The longest sentence a court can impose is life in jail. In these cases the judge is also expected to set a minimum term that must be served at His Majesty's pleasure before the parole board considers release.
This is a list of defendants given the longest sentences in recent years.
A serial sex attacker stalked his victim as she made her way home from a night out before raping her in a graveyard. Convicted rapist Cosmin-Nicolae Vasioiu, 47, prowled Exeter city centre looking for a lone woman to attack in June last year.
The Romania national followed his victim as she walked home from a night out with friends and attacked her in the grounds of St Bartholomew’s Cemetery. She tried to fight him off, but he stripped her naked and raped her and only fled when she screamed, which alerted residents living nearby to her plight.
CCTV footage captured Vasioiu in Exeter High Street prior to the attack trying to identify possible targets. Footage also clearly showed Vasioiu following his victim, who is a woman in her 30s, through the Iron Bridge area of Exeter.
A martial arts instructor used his position to sexually abuse girls during a relentless campaign spanning more than three decades. Derek Hodder, widely known in the Brixham community by his middle name Ross, raped and indecently assaulted nine girls aged between 13 and 17.
He groomed, psychologically manipulated and abused a succession of young and vulnerable victims, using his involvement in martial arts to get close to them. He pursued them for his own sexual gratification, preyed on their inexperience, turned them against their families and groomed them by buying gifts and telling them it was their 'secret'.
Hodder managed to carry out his crimes while maintaining an outwardly respectable position in the building trade and in the South Devon martial arts community. In private, he bragged about how tough he was and how everyone was scared of him.
A 71-year-old Paignton man was jailed for 20 years for multiple historic sex offences against a child. Warwick Conway was found guilty of 17 charges, some dating back 40 years, after a trial at Exeter Crown Court.
He denied 10 allegations of indecent assault, six of rape and possessing indecent images of children. But after more than six and a half hours of deliberations the jury returned guilty verdicts to all the charges.
During the trial the jury heard evidence from the victim who described Conway as a 'paedophile and a psychopath'. The judge said his deviant crimes had left the victim with deep psychological scars.
A Plymouth churchgoer ‘blighted the childhood’ of a fellow worshipper by raping her when she was just 12. Ian Symonds started grooming the girl more than a year before the rape attack in a pub car park and went on to persuade her to have a three-year under-age relationship with him.
The 40-year-old brainwashed her into believing that God approved of them having sex and told her that the Virgin Mary was only 12 when she and Joseph first slept together.
A child rapist from Devon was jailed for the sexual abuse of three girls. Aaron Bennett, 33, was convicted of eleven serious sexual offences at a trial in October.
The paedophile returned to Exeter Crown Court on Tuesday (November 21) to be sentenced for his crimes. Judge Stephen Climie imposed a 28-year sentence with an extension of eight years due to the danger he poses.
The judge said the offending had a significant psychological effect on the victims. He told Bennett: "This for you is the end of a chapter in your life and the beginning of your time in custody."
A Devon woman who knifed her husband in the back - then claimed she was the victim of domestic violence - was sentenced to life in prison for his murder. Christine Rawle said she was terrified of husband Ian Rawle, 72, when she stabbed him at their house near Braunton.
She told police he had been cruel, controlling and violent to her during a 29-year marriage. But a jury at Exeter Crown Court did not believe her account and found her guilty of murder after a trial.
He said: "It was a wholly unprovoked attack when he was completely defenceless." He said Ian Rawle was "in no way the serial domestic abuser" his wife tried to paint him as. Instead she had ignored his pleas for help and watched him die.
Gerald Ludlam, also known as Toby Ludlam, was convicted of 14 serious sexual offences at a trial at Exeter Crown Court in 2022.
Ludlam, who committed the offences in the 1990s and early 2000s, described himself as a 'hard-drinking and hard-working biker' who had been wrongly accused. But a judge labelled him dangerous paedophile when he was sentenced in February.
One said: "The abuse I suffered at his hands affected all aspects of my life."
A deviant mother and stepfather who raped and sexually abused her child were each jailed for 24 years. The woman's daughter was aged between five and seven when she was subjected to depraved abuse by the pair in Devon.
The couple would share messages about what they called their 'naughty' behaviour with the mother being present during acts of appalling abuse. The 36-year-old woman and the 50-year-old man denied doing anything wrong but were convicted of multiple offences by a jury trial in October. They returned to court in January to be sentenced.
They cannot be named to protect the identity of the victim.
A bullied murderer who killed his tormentor by setting fire to a house in Torquay was jailed for life. Raymond Lynagh started the inferno in Ellacombe Road that fatally poisoned Dean Corbett with fumes.
He lit the ferocious blaze because Mr Corbett, a known drug dealer, had invaded his home, taken over his room and physically assaulted him. Lynagh started the fire in the sitting room while Mr Corbett was asleep in his bedroom.
Before leaving the house he fed the flames with a gas pipe which he wrenched from the wall behind the cooker. Lynagh, nicknamed China, casually sat on a stool outside the house and watched the flames engulf the ground floor of the premises.
Two men were jailed for a frenzied and brutal armed ambush of a couple in Exeter. Dwayne Huggins and Curtis Dhers attacked a man and his girlfriend as they were walking home near Polsloe Bridge.
Huggins tried to murder Mr Greenhalgh with an axe shouting 'I'm going to f*****g kill you,' as he struck him on the head. Dhers, who Huggins had recruited to help him in the attack, hit the victim's terrified partner with a baseball bat.
The victim was so badly injured that he was put into an induced coma by surgeons repairing his fractured skull. He still suffers memory loss as well as other physical and psychological trauma.
A mechanic was jailed for a campaign of sexual abuse on three boys in the 1990s. David Hargreaves was living and working in Exeter at the time he groomed his teenage victims, a court heard.
Hargreaves, 61, denied the charges but was found guilty of multiple sex offences following a trial. He was given a 23-year sentence of which to serve a minimum of 14 years in prison.
The court heard how Hargreaves befriended and groomed three boys in the 1990s. The abuse of which began when the boys were between 12 and 15 years old. Hargreaves would often buy the boys’ gifts and give them money while all the while indecently assaulting them repeatedly.
A ‘merciless’ killer was jailed for life in 2021 for the brutal murder of a disabled pensioner who he was supposed to be caring for. Michael Robinson has been told he must serve at least 30 years in jail for strangling and kicking 77-year-old Carol Hart to death during an attack in her home in Northam.
He killed her to silence her after she discovered he had stolen half her life savings and reported him to the police and his employers.
He tried to cover his tracks by throwing his bloodstained boots and clothing into a bin lorry shortly afterwards but was caught because one bloodied boot was found at a tip.
A couple were jailed for life for the ‘savage and brutal murder of a vulnerable autistic man who was kicked to death in his own home. Lee Chugg and Jodie Swannick kicked and stamped on charity shop volunteer Stephen Fogg and caused appalling and fatal injuries to his skull, face and chest.
Mr Fogg, aged 60, had learning difficulties and may have been targeted by the two drunken attackers because of false rumours that he was a paedophile.
The prosecution described the killing as sadistic. The Judge told the killers their attack had been savage and brutal and that they had tried to save their own skins rather than answering the dying man’s pleas for help.
LIFE WITH MINIMUM OF 20 AND 18 YEARS
A drug-addict ex-prostitute neighbour was jailed for life in 2019 for the murder of a man in Paignton. Peter Flux, 74, was stabbed to death by Faye Burford, 41, because he refused to give her £20 to buy drugs.
Burford owed several debts and had gone to Mr Flux’s flat to borrow more money. During the meeting, Burford grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Mr Flux numerous times, inflicting superficial wounds, scratches and the fatal stab wound.
After the incident, Burford took Mr Flux’s personal effects, including his passport and took out a credit card using his name. Burford also stole money from Mr Flux, using it to purchase drugs. She then disposed of her clothes and the murder weapon in a nearby bin.
A sexual predator from Paignton was jailed for 22 years for a campaign of rape against a teenage girl. Andrew Pitt, aged 63, groomed, touched, then sexually abused the girl multiple times.
He told the vulnerable child that if she told anybody what he was doing she would go to "kiddie prison". She kept her ordeal secret for many years but eventually told a partner and Pitt was arrested.
The defendant, of Foxhole Road, denied five allegations of rape, claiming the girl had made advances to him and he was "too weak to resist". But a jury saw through his lies and found him guilty after a trial in November.
A teenage killer was sentenced to life for the murder of homeless Exeter man Stephen Cook. Brian Jewell must serve a minimum of 20 years for stabbing Mr Cook during a fight outside Betfred in Sidwell Street in January.
Mr Cook, known to many people living rough in the city as Cookie, died from a single stab wound to the chest. He staggered into the shop after the brawl and fell to the ground.
Jewell, now 20, was convicted of his murder at a trial in August. He claimed he acted in self-defence when he was attacked by Mr Cook who was wielding a broken glass bottle.
A dangerous sexual predator who targeted and raped two intoxicated women in Torquay was jailed for life. Lewis Stewart, pretended he wanted to help the women after they staggered out of The Green Ginger Wetherspoon pub.
But his real motive was to take advantage of their paralytic condition. Stewart and his girlfriend took the women home in a taxi. He had sex with both women when they were passed out.
The next morning they woke to hear him bragging about about group sex. They had no memory of the incident but Stewart, a registered sex offender, had taken a photo of one of the women while she was undressed and unconscious.
A 24-year-old man was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Exeter woman Lorraine Cox.
Azam Mangori killed and dismembered the body of his 32-year-old victim in his flat above the Bodrum Kebab Shop in the centre of the city in September last year.
He then used her phone and social media accounts to pretend to family and friends that she was still alive.
LIFE WITH MINIMUM TERM OF 20 YEARS
A gang which ran a £1.6 million drug dealing operation in Torquay and Newton Abbot was jailed in 2020 for a total of 146 years. The organised crime group brought a kilogram of heroin and cocaine a month from Liverpool and its leaders used extreme violence to protect their turf.
Leader Joshua Garrett was jailed for setting up and running the group and attempting to murder a tourist who he mistook for a rival dealer from London. His gang used a network of couriers and runners to bring the drugs from Liverpool, take cash back in the other direction, and distribute them on the streets of South Devon.
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