Vaughan Mark Hildebrand: Rapist ex-cop appeals jail sentence
A rapist ex-cop jailed for blackmailing women into having sex with him says his time behind bars has been “more onerous” due to his former employment.
Vaughan Mark Hildebrand tormented 15 women for a decade, assuming fake identities and using random numbers to scam them into sending him nude photos, and abused his status as a police officer to force some to perform sex acts on him.
In September 2019 he was sentenced to at least 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to 44 charges, including 11 counts of sexual intercourse without consent relating to the rape of four women.
The 31-year-old also admitted to 10 counts of using a carriage service to menace or harass and one of soliciting child abuse material, with Judge Robyn Tupman proclaiming he had “failed as a human”.
“He abused his position as a police officer, he abused the trust of his friends, he abused the trust of his partner,” Judge Tupman said.
Now the disgraced cop is fighting his lengthy non-parole period and 20-year head sentence in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal. His barrister Sue Kluss said on Wednesday her client’s early guilty pleas should have earned him a more lenient punishment.
The Campbelltown man appeared on screen from the South Coast Correctional Centre in Nowra, having now served more than three years in custody.
Although conceding his “significant level of criminality and multiplicity of victims”, Ms Kluss said Hildebrand’s circumstances in jail were “more onerous” than others “by way of the fact of his former employment”.
She said it could be argued Hildebrand’s use of mobile phones to send the despicable threats to some of his victims “may have reduced his criminality” as he often did not make them face-to-face.
Ms Kuss claimed the accumulated sentence should be remitted to the District Court, as the coupling of commonwealth and state offences may leave the former cop languishing in jail longer than he should be.
The District Court has previously heard Hildebrand’s victims included friends and fellow police officers.
Sometimes the women would come to him for help, unaware he was the one secretly manipulating them.
His first offence occurred in 2007 when he forced a teenager to perform oral sex by threatening to send nude images of her to her family, friends and her boss.
Years later after he joined NSW Police in 2011, he would use his new-found standing to sexually assault her again when she asked him for advice about a relative’s arrest.
Police colleagues arrested him in 2017 after years of betrayal and conniving abuse.
Hildebrand will be eligible for parole in 2032.
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