An oil executive has been found guilty of abusing women during a 24-year campaign of terror – but insisted last night that he was actually the victim.
David Cox was convicted of four charges of violent against a former girlfriend and his wife of more than 20 years.
He battered, punched and throttled them “without warning”.
A jury at Aberdeen Sheriff Court also found him guilty of terrorising another women when she was just a child – seizing her by the throat, striking her on the head, dragging her along the ground and threatening her with a bayonet.
Cox’s wife, Corrina – who broke down during his four-day trial as she relived her fear that she might do or say something to set him off – said she was pleased justice had been done and branded him an “evil man”.
But outside court, Cox showed no remorse.
Instead, he brazenly claimed that he had been assumed guilty from the moment he first sat in the dock and that he “never stood a chance”.
The 63-year-old said the system was “heavily weighted” towards the alleged victims in domestic abuse cases – and that no one had ever asked him if he was ok.
“Nobody ever came to me and asked ‘how do you feel about this?’ The truth is I have felt suicidal at times and very depressed,” he said.
“There is no middle ground. The allegations are made and you have to try and defend them, but it’s very, very difficult.
“It’s what he said against what she said.”
During four days of emotional evidence, Cox – who address was given in court papers as 32 Woodcock Court, Stonehaven – watched and listened carefully as his ex-girlfriend and wife gave evidence against him.
His former lover, Rosemary Ringwood, who moved to the north-east to be with him in the early 1990s, said she feared she would become a “battered wife” at his hands.
But she decided that they could make things work and moved into Cox’s cottage at Glassel, near Banchory, when he landed a job with Shell.
Shortly after, he launched one of his most vicious attacks, putting his hands around her throat and squeezing as they lay in bed one night.
Miss Ringwood told the court she eventually did a “runner” following more unpredictable attacks.
But Cox played dumb when asked what could have caused her to leave him – and said he had always found it “very odd” that she ran away.
His wife wept several times as she gave evidence in court, describing the devastating impact her husband’s attacks had on her.
Cox once pushed her from a moving vehicle after a night out, and even threw her over a bin in their kitchen while she was pregnant with their first child – blaming her for hurting the baby.
He straddled and strangled her in bed in a strikingly similar attack to the one on Miss Ringwood, and even scared her so much she would escape to the woods around their house.
Mrs Cox, a 43-year-old retained firefighter who lives at Banchory, said she never left her husband because she was so in love with him, and that she desperately believed that one day his “violent outbursts” would stop.
It was only when he was arrested in summer last year following an assault at their home that she realised she had to leave him.
“He made me feel that I needed him – like I would be nothing without him,” she said.
Mrs Cox and her family, who sat through the entire trial, said yesterday that “justice had prevailed”.
But Cox said he had been wrongfully found guilty of attacks he considered to be “abhorrent”.
He added, however, that he would not be appealing against his conviction.
“I do not see any point – the jury has made its decision, and I just have to live with it and move forward,” he said.
“I’m not a law breaker. I abhor violence – it’s a horrible, horrible thing.”