KEY POINTS:
A prisoner confessed in a letter to a Tauranga couple, whom he terrorised after enjoying their hospitality, that he felt "like the worst person in the world".
"Day after day I wake up and I am reminded of the reason I am here," Geoffrey Alan Broderson, 31, said in a letter of apology he wrote from his remand cell at Waikeria Prison.
"I have an enormous amount of guilt and sadness for my actions. You were never other than nice to me."
Lawyer Craig Tuck read extracts from the letter at his client's sentencing in Tauranga District Court today on a raft of violence charges.
Judge Peter Rollo jailed Broderson for a total of six years, with a minimum non-parole period of three-and-a-half years, for sexually attacking the middle-aged woman in her home, plus assaulting and threatening her, her husband and a neighbour with knives.
Broderson pleaded guilty late last year, just before the start of a depositions hearing, to sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection, attempted sexual connection, abduction, aggravated wounding, assaults with a weapon, and unlawfully entering a building.
The abduction count related to detaining the wife in her bathroom.
Judge Rollo echoed the crown prosecutor in lauding the bravery of the 58-year-old woman who risked her life fighting Broderson.
"She feared being raped or murdered, or both," said the judge.
She was still suffering acute traumatic stress and her husband "significant emotional harm."
Outlining what happened one fateful evening last October, Judge Rollo said Broderson was a self-invited guest who later began to "act in a bizarre way and became violent."
Described as an acquaintance, he had simply turned up bringing alcohol.
After a few drinks, Broderson was invited to stay for dinner and then offered a bed for the night because he had drunk too much to drive.
The 61-year-old husband went out to lock his car and returned to find Broderson crawling along the hallway on all fours.
Asked if he was okay, he got abusive and shoved his host violently on to the lounge floor.
Broderson then brandished a steak knife from the kitchen. The victim managed to flee next door to call police.
Armed with another knife, Broderson sexually violated the woman and locked her and himself in the bathroom where he hit her repeatedly about the head.
He held a knife to her face and punched her when she refused to do what he wanted.
Broderson then "somewhat inexplicably" ran off, Judge Rollo said.
He climbed the fence and barged into a 78-year-old neighbour's house "talking gibberish."
Having held a knife to the terrified man's shoulder blades, Broderson suddenly walked out and police arrested him soon after.
Two psychiatrists reported that Broderson had a significant alcohol problem.
The judge said he had received a number of testimonials in which the prisoner's partner and friends said they were at a loss to understand "how you could have offended in this way.
"To some extent, you are too. You cannot offer any explanation," he said to Broderson, who was silent in the dock, his back deliberately to the public seating and face screened throughout the proceedings by his long hair.
- NZPA
