Jeremiah Sheridan Sheffield: How Crimewatch appeal helped snare 'monster' rapist after 18 years

It was a case which shocked the city when the details of the horror attack came out during the sentencing of Jeremiah Sheridan at Sheffield Crown Court in 2009.

Sheridan, who was just 18 at the time of the attack, had left a frail, wheelchair-bound woman with life-threatening injuries after he attacked her in Sheffield in 1991.

At the time of the rape, police staged a huge manhunt and arrested six men who had been selling furniture house-to-house in the city at the time.

But the real perpetrator, Sheridan, who had also been selling door-to-door with the group of travellers, slipped the net because at 18 he was thought to be too young to be responsible.

His past began to catch up with him in 2005 when he was arrested for a public order offence in Cambridgeshire and gave a false name to the police – Dan O’Brien.

He was never charged but his DNA was taken and stored on the national database and when South Yorkshire Police re-examined the 1991 rape case, his DNA matched with a sample from the scene.

When police cross-checked it with fingerprints they discovered Sheridan’s true identity.

It took a year and an appeal on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme for police to track him down. Two weeks after the TV broadcast, Sheridan contacted police through a solicitor.

He had been in Australia when the Crimewatch programme was aired and claimed he was returning to the UK to clear his name, but police suspected he may have been forced to leave after his visa was cancelled for working illegally.

Sheridan was arrested on a plane at Heathrow Airport.

Speaking to The Star in 2005 after Sheridan pleaded guilty to two counts of rape, detective sergeant Ian Harding, who worked in South Yorkshire Police’s Cold Case Review Team, said the Irish traveller based in Essex was a “monster” who had shown no remorse for his horrific crime.

He added: “I’m very pleased. It’s taken so much to get this far I would say it’s a momentous day. The result justifies all the work over the years which runs to thousands of hours.

“The woman was severely disabled and unable to defend herself in any way. The injuries she sustained were medically proven to have been capable of causing her death if she’d been unable to summon the emergency services.

“I don’t want to speculate about his motives or whether the initial investigation scared him to death or whether he has been offending and getting away with it since.

“We are about upholding the law and above all giving victims justice.”

DS Harding said the rape occurred after Sheridan’s victim answered her door on May 10, 1991. Sheridan asked if she wanted to buy carpets and soft furnishings, but when she declined he barged in and used her toilet.

Then he lifted her out of her wheelchair and violently raped her, resulting in serious internal injuries, before fleeing.

The woman dialled 999 but was unable to make herself understood and the operator had to trace the call.

DS Harding said it was only when her husband attended hospital and acted as translator did it become known she had been raped.

Police launched an inquiry four hours after the attack but by then the group of travellers Sheridan was with, who had been in the area for days, had disappeared.

DS Harding said they finally caught up with them near Leeds six days later. But after tests, all the men arrested were released without charge and the case went cold.

Sadly, the rape victim’s husband, who had been out fishing at the time of the attack, died before Sheridan was brought to justice.

Sheridan, a married dad-of-four, wept throughout his sentencing hearing at Sheffield Crown Court.

Andrew Frymann, defending, said he was remorseful and had confessed his crime to a priest who told him to hand himself in.

Jailing him for 15-and-a-half years, Judge Graham Robinson, said: “The victim was a vulnerable woman attacked in her own home. She was subjected to life-threatening violence and you abandoned your victim, leaving her with serious injuries. ”

At the time DS Harding said: “South Yorkshire Police never close undetected cases for murders and other serious offences and we are reviewing them all.”

Sheridan was snared by South Yorkshire Police’s original cold case review team, which was set up in 2007 to review serious unsolved sex crimes.

That team of five, including DS Harding, was disbanded in 2014 but was made up of retired detectives who were re-employed as civilian investigators. They enjoyed considerable success, putting 12 men, who thought they’d got away with their crimes, behind bars.

A major incident review team was later set up to examine unsolved murders and sex crimes.