Description
As the smirking face of rapist Iyoseph Derry appeared in the paper, a traumatised mum spiralled into a catastrophic breakdown. Suddenly she could smell him again.
She was reminded of that 'look of evil' in his eyes and could feel him breathing down her neck. Because at the age of 19, she became his first victim.
To her horror, she wasn't his last. She wept as she discovered the thug who 'broke her eye socket, dented her skull and sliced her throat with a knife' had gone on to rape a vulnerable clubber.
The brave survivor of his first attack has now broken her silence as the 33-year-old sits behind bars, serving a decade-long sentence for rape and abetting rape in 2018.
"When I saw him in the paper, that was the final straw. I went into hibernation," the mum told BirminghamLive after the February 2022 sentence.
"I quit my job and everything, I wouldn't go to work. I felt like I could smell him. I felt I could still feel him breathing down my neck.
"I could see that look, that anger that he had in his eyes when he was punching me and I was screaming."
Only a week into dating Derry, on November 13, 2006, she says he punched her so hard she was left with a broken eye socket. He was convicted of wounding with intent and threats to kill; crimes that saw him jailed for a nine year extended sentence in 2010.
"People like him, will never stop. That's the one thing I know with that man," she continued. "He doesn't learn, he doesn't care. He's got no feeling, he is horrible."
Before she saw news of the rape, the mum-of-one had been trying to plough on with life and move forward. But the second she saw his mugshot in the paper, she suffered a breakdown and the memories came flooding back.
"He broke my eye socket and dented my skull, sliced my throat with a knife. I should have had a metal plate in my face," she recalled.
"When the jury looked at the pictures of me, I was unrecognisable. In the original Candyman, he hits her in the face with his hook when she's in the toilet and her eye is the size of a golf ball - my face was all swollen like that.
"I looked like a model the one side but the other side of the face was absolutely destroyed."
After the attack, she "managed to convince" Derry to take her to the hospital for the injury to her face. "People were saying it was only a black eye. But I could feel it in my head, it was radiating through my face like a shockwave," she added.
"I went to the toilet and my nose kept running. Even though my face was smashed in, I was trying to make sure that my son didn't see me crying.
"I blew my nose and when I did, my eye popped out like a balloon and I looked and said, 'this is not a black eye, I need to go to the hospital'.
"He put a knife to my throat and said, 'when you go hospital what you going to say?' I said: 'That you did it'. He just dug the knife further in my throat and I knew I was not going to get away with telling them."
When they arrived at hospital the terrified young mum told a nurse she had been punched in a mugging, but she probed further.
"He was threatening to batter me when we got back"
"He was watching me like a hawk. From there, she said 'who did it?', my son turned around and said 'he did it'. He kicked off as she (the nurse) walked away," she claimed.
"He dragged me out of the hospital because he thought she was going to call someone. We had gone to the bus stop and he was threatening to batter me when we got back."
Once on board the double decker bus, she said he tried to threaten her into coming upstairs with her young son. But, with an escape route in mind, she refused.
"He said to me: 'If you don't get upstairs, I'm going to do to your face what I did to that side' and started laughing. He told me to watch what happens when we get back.
"I sat on the bus and the adrenaline just kicked in and I ran to the driver and said 'let me off'. He told me he couldn't.
"I moved my hair from my face and removed the cap from my head and I said 'he's done this to me and if you don't let me off this bus my life will be in your hands'".
He opened the doors and she "dragged her son across the road" in a desperate attempt to escape Derry. She ran to Edgbaston police station, which was being revamped at the time.
"They had a little container outside I just went to ask them to call me a taxi, but it said no caps, no hoods, no hats," she said.
"I removed my cap and some drunken guy was saying 'look at the state of her'. It was absolutely disgusting. I just walked outside and lay on the floor, I just completely collapsed.
"My son just stood there rubbing my back. It was quite heartbreaking," she said, now choking back tears on the thought of it.
A kind-hearted taxi driver took the mother and son to a petrol station, bought sweets to "calm down" the child and never charged her for the ride. The following day, once her boy was safe, she called West Midlands Police.
It took months to arrest him, as she said he was going under a fake name 'Reheem' at the time. He was eventually jailed for five years in prison, with a four year extension period in 2010. But despite justice being served, she still suffers with headaches from his attack to this day.
And the simple task of blowing her nose is not an option, with air becoming trapped behind her eye if she does.
"The doctors gave me two options," she recalled, "I either suffer with the headaches and my vision or I risk my vision and have the metal plate to control the headaches.
"I didn't want to be partially blind. They said with the operation there are complications because of where he broke my eye socket. It was right on the corner of the sinus and that part of the face doesn't heal. So even to this day I can't blow my nose."
In 2018, Derry and another bouncer went on to target a vulnerable woman while working at the trouble-hit Banjul Nightclub in Wolverhampton. Derry raped her in the car before she was assaulted further at a flat.
The rapist, of no fixed address, was jailed for ten years after being found guilty of rape and aiding and abetting rape in a Birmingham Crown Court trial. His partner in crime Hassan Bockarie, 34, of High Street, Erdington, was convicted of one charge of rape and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years.