AN evil sex attacker who has already served six years for raping three elderly women in Bournemouth was last night jailed for life for repeatedly raping a 74-year-old woman in her own home.

Anthony Joyce, 49, simply shook his head as the jury convicted him on five charges - two counts of rape, two of false imprisonment and one of burglary.

Jurors at Bristol Crown Court took less than an hour to find Joyce, of Neville Close, Salisbury, guilty of the sickening offences.

He denied tying up an elderly mother and daughter in a Wiltshire house before brutally raping the 74-year-old daughter and stealing items from her home.

Immediately after Joyce was convicted, it emerged he had previously been sentenced to ten years in prison for raping three other elderly women in Bournemouth in 1982 and 1983, one of whom was in her 90s.

The vicious attacks shocked the community.

When Mr Justice Taylor at Winchester Crown Court sentenced Joyce, who lived in Winton at the time of the offences, he called them "the most callous acts of human depravity".

He said the sentence had to express the revulsion of society and protect women for a long time.

Judge Carol Hagen said the latest trial had proved to be "the most harrowing of cases", adding Joyce, a painter and decorator, had carefully planned the "particularly degrading" assault.

The court heard Joyce had conned his way into the house by posing as a telephone engineer. During an hour-long ordeal the daughter was raped repeatedly after being blindfolded with a pillowcase and tied to an overturned chair in the living room. Her mother was bound and had adhesive tape placed over her eyes.

Joyce had gone to considerable lengths to conceal his identity, but it was DNA evidence found on a tiny piece of a glove at the scene that eventually snared him.

Joyce claimed he had been working in another area, but the DNA found on the glove had just a one in seven million chance of belonging to someone other than him.

Wiltshire police said they would now be looking at whether Joyce could be linked to other unsolved cases.