Justice Trish Kelly handed down her verdict in the Supreme Court today, after the 60-year-old’s trial on charges of rape and unlawful detention.
She found him not guilty on both charges.
The woman had come to Adelaide from Tasmania to stay with the man over the 2015/16 new year and the court was told she woke one night to find him tying her hands to the bed before she was raped.
In final submissions prosecutor, Jim Pearce said the woman had “stuck to her guns” during her evidence to the court.
But defence counsel Bill Boucaut described her as a “woman scorned” who had been rejected by the love of her life.
In court on Friday, Kelly ordered the man return to court next week for sentencing submissions on a third matter, that he attacked another backpacker in 2014.
The man recently pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assault in that case.
In the Salt Creek case the man, who can’t be identified, was convicted of attacking two young backpackers on a remote SA beach in February 2016.
He picked them up at a railway station and drove them to sand dunes in SA’s Coorong National Park, where he violently attacked them.
He tied up a Brazilian woman with rope and sexually assaulted her before hitting a German woman in the head with a hammer several times and repeatedly ramming her with his 4WD.
A jury in March found him guilty of six charges, including indecent assault, aggravated kidnapping and endangering life.
– AAP