Rapist husband tried to slip tablets into wife’s food to drug her

Warning: This article contains distressing content

A husband who for years raped his wife while she was unconscious complained that tablets he was sent for drugging her tasted too bitter to slip into her curry and wine, a jury heard.

Prosecutors said the “sad reality of this case” was that by using websites such as fabswingers.com he had been able to find at least 13 of the “many men” whose fantasy was to “abuse an unconscious woman”.

The husband and four other men have admitted a series of sexual offences against her, but nine others deny all charges and are standing trial at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court.

Jurors heard the husband had entered into an “agreement” to supply videos of the abuse in exchange for knock-out drugs.

Louise Oakley KC, prosecuting, said the husband’s offending was believed to have started in the early 2000s and at first had relied solely on alcohol.

From 2023, he began inviting men to the family home in the Stockport area of Greater Manchester to join the abuse, although “had been talking about it for years”.

“Any right-minded human who walked into that bedroom with two eyes, two ears and half a brain would have realised she was not conscious,” Oakley said.

“They knew. They wanted that.”

Oakley said in the early days of the husband’s offending “he wanted to share her but recognised that alcohol alone was not going to be enough”.

The husband eventually became so “desperate” he even asked one alleged accomplice, David Graves, to post tablets to the empty home of a recently deceased elderly relative of his wife.

“Does it get any worse than that?” Oakley asked.