The North Shore Rapist should have had the book thrown him. Instead, the courts kept giving him a chance

Well, wasn’t that entirely predictable? Just six months after victims of the notorious North Shore Rapist warned he would offend again, Graham James Kay is back behind bars.

Kay, one of Sydney’s worst sex offenders, was arrested on Friday for allegedly sexually touching a teenage girl in Sydney’s city centre. Police were called to a chemist on George Street about 6pm where they were told a 16-year-old girl had been allegedly assaulted by a man not known to her.

About 1am on Saturday, investigators and the riot squad executed a search warrant at a unit on Oxford Street in Blacktown, where a 73-year-old man was arrested. He was taken to Blacktown police station.

He did not appear on the video screen when his matter was briefly mentioned by a magistrate, and he will remain in custody until Monday, when the matter returns to the Downing Centre Local Court.

Kay committed a series of stalking and groping attacks on women and girls in the 1970s and 1980s, but was only given good behaviour bonds for every crime.

He escalated in the 1990s to sexual attacks on eight women and girls while armed with a knife – six rapes and two more attempts.

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He spent two decades in prison for the series of violent attacks and returned to the community in 2023 despite reoffending in 2018 and 2022. Again, he was given only a good behaviour bond for indecently assaulting a 16-year-old girl.

As the Herald’s Perry Duffin reports, Kay’s history of reoffending occurred despite his being subjected to extended supervision orders (ESO), which are designed to keep a short leash on the most dangerous offenders.

In 2018, Kay breached his ESO by approaching the 16-year-old girl working at a supermarket and giving her a “slobbery kiss” on the cheek. She was horrified, and it was media publicity that helped her realise the man who had attacked her was the infamous North Shore Rapist.