Daryll Rowe to be sentenced after deliberately trying to infect men with HIV
The hairdresser purposefully set out to infect the men
By Steve Brown
A hairdresser who deliberately tried to infect men with HIV is set to be sentenced today (18.04.18).
Daryll Rowe became the first man in the UK to be found guilty of intentionally wanting to spread the virus and faces a life sentence with an extended term for being a danger to the public.
The 27 year old was convicted in October of 10 charges – five of grievous bodily harm with intent and five of attempting to do so – and is set to appear in Brighton Crown Court for his sentence
Rowe was diagnosed in April 2015 in his home city of Edinburgh and proceeded to meet men on Grindr and had sex with eight of them in Brighton from October to February 2016.
He then went on the run from the police and targeted two more men before he was detained by police at a Brighton flat last year.
In his first interview, he told officers: “Either this is a big, dramatic lie or someone out there has actually done this.
“What if they are just trying to single me out. Gay people can be horrible. This is one of the reasons I left Edinburgh, there’s a lot of horrible people up there.”
During his six-week trial, it was said he went on a cynical and deliberate campaign to infect men with HIV, refusing treatment and ignoring advice from his doctors.
Rowe insisted on having unprotected sex with men, claiming he was “clean†and when they refused, he tampered the condoms, tricking them into thinking they were having safe sex.
He would then become aggressive and taunted some of the men in text messages and constantly lied to authorities and would use aliases with his victims.