‘I thought, OK, he goes for drunk guys’: friends and flatmates on the Reynhard Sinaga they knew

How did Britain's worst rapist evade capture for so long?

Everyone has a similar reaction when they see Reynhard Sinaga for the first time. It was the same whenever a new reporter came into the Manchester crown courtroom and stared into the dock. Sitting there, smiling, between three hulking security guards, was a small man with thick-rimmed hipster glasses, playing with the shiny, shoulder-length hair he had not cut since his arrest in June 2017. Him? That's Britain's worst rapist? Predators come in all shapes and sizes, but Sinaga's "worst ever" billing was hard to square with the boyish figure in the lumberjack shirt, scribbling notes behind the bulletproof glass as a stream of nervous young men went into the witness box to testify against him.

The Guardian was present at three out of Sinaga's four trials, and Sinaga often seemed to be enjoying himself. He would cock his head to one side, as if studying a nature documentary, as he watched videos of himself raping dozens of men who had made the mistake of going back to his flat after a drunken night out. The prosecution tried to persuade the judge, Suzanne Goddard QC, that Sinaga didn't need to see the films he had recorded on two iPhones, one perched on a dresser for long shots and another handheld for closeups. But Goddard reluctantly ruled that he should be allowed to see the evidence in order to mount what seemed to be a hopeless defence: that he wasn't a sexual predator, but a harmless deviant. He just happened to be irresistible to young, usually straight men, who would pretend to be asleep as part of a sexual fantasy in which Sinaga would penetrate them on camera, sometimes for hours on end.