The three women standing shoulder to shoulder have 14 children between them. Some of those sons and daughters have seen more than any child should.

‘On the night I thought he was going to kill me, my daughter was asleep in her bed,’ says 37 year-old Siobhan McTaggart, the smallest of the women and the one who is most nervous about being here today.

‘She was six at the time,’ she continues. ‘He was on top of me, hands around my neck, strangling me. I couldn’t breathe or shout. I could feel myself going, losing consciousness. All I could think was ‘She’s going to come in here in the morning and I’ll be dead in my bed. And what will he do with her?’.’

Neither of the other two women is remotely shocked by this. They simply nod, and share their own stories of the things that somehow became ‘normal’ in their homes, at the hands of their same tormentor, Mark McMillan.

Screaming. Swearing. Blood. Walls punched in. Bruises. Rape. Strangulation. Drugging. Financial exploitation. Sexually explicit pictures taken without consent, even without the women’s knowledge, and uploaded to the internet for the world to see.

Think that the sort of depravity evidenced in France during the shocking case of Gisele Pelicot couldn’t happen in the UK? Think again, because there are parallels here.

‘I’d often pass out when he was strangling me and wake up in a completely different position, up against the wall or on the floor,’ says Lynne-Marie Hand, 39.

Lynne’s older children, she says, had some understanding of what was going on, ‘but as a mother you try to say, ‘Oh I’m fine. Nothing to worry about’,’ she says,

Pictured from left to right: Charmaine Walker, Lynn-Marie Hand and Siobhan McTaggart. All three women were victims of the same man who repeatedly violated by him over the same period. None of them knew of the other’s existence, and thought they were suffering alone, and in silence

Mark McMillan, the Beast (their agreed name for him), is a 18 stone former body-builder who between January 2022 and July 2023 raped and sexually abused Charmaine Walker, Lynn-Marie Hand and Siobhan McTaggart

There was lots to worry about. ‘I’m just surprised he didn’t kill one of us. It was the only thing left for him to do, really. He told me exactly how he was going to kill me, too. He said it would be the perfect crime.’

Astonishingly these three women, meeting me in an Ayrshire hotel and bravely waiving their legal right to anonymity, were victims of the same man, repeatedly violated by him over the same period. None of them knew of the other’s existence, and thought they were suffering alone, and in silence.

And the only reason he is behind bars today – found guilty in December 2025 of five counts of rape and sexual assault – is because, having learned of each other’s existence, they got in touch, joining forces to bring their attacker to justice.

This month, at the High Court in Kilmarnock, Lord Harrower imposed an extended sentence of 14 years on McMillan – 11 to be served in prison and three on licence in the community.

‘This is what happens when you tell women you will kill them if they speak out,’ says Lynne

The Beast (their agreed name for him) is a 18 stone former body-builder who specialised in, as Siobhan puts it, ‘helping himself to women’s bodies’.

Between January 2022 and July 2023, he raped and sexually abused all three women.

It was Lynne – the eldest and their leader – who first found the courage to go to the police, but only after five months of torture.

All three women suffered abuse at the hands of McMillan but  Charmaine (right) discovered worse. Her images had been uploaded to a website. ‘It was Lynne who found them,’ she says. ‘They’ve been taken down now, but it’s the most vile thing in the world to think that pictures of you are out there’ 

The women claim McMillan – who was very active on dating sites which allowed him to hook up with local women – asked them to have sex with other men while he watched. None would agree

While McMillan was being questioned, she retrieved the Sim card from his phone, which he’d smashed in a fit of rage, and inserted it into her own handset.

She scrolled through his messages, rightly suspecting she would find other women there.

When she answered a text from one, she found herself in conversation with mother-of-two Charmaine Walker – a complete stranger then; a friend today.

‘The first time we spoke Lynne told me [ITAL] she [ITAL] was Mark’s partner and she’d just had him [arrested] by the police and she was going to press charges,’ says Charmaine, 35.

‘She said he’d raped her and beaten her up. I said ‘He did that to me, too’. She said ‘You have got to come forward’. I said ‘I can’t’. She said ‘Yes you can’.’

And so it began. It didn’t take much detective work for them to find a third woman who also involved with him – Siobhan, a mother of three.

She told them [ITAL] she [ITAL] thought she was McMillian’s girlfriend: he’d moved himself into her house, and had his own front door key.

Her story was familiar: he’d seemed OK to begin with, but it wasn’t long before she was being raped, abused and gaslit on a daily basis, with not a single soul aware of what was going on.

After Lynne (left) called the police on McMillian things became much darker. On his return, McMillan told Lynne that he would kill her if she made a further complaint 

‘Until I spoke to Lynne, I hadn’t told another person in the world that he’d been raping me,’ says Siobhan.

‘I was ashamed and embarrassed. I didn’t know how. This was a man who was having dinner with my parents. How could I say to them about all the vile things he was doing, about the fact that I thought he was going to kill me?’

It is a surreal experience to sit overlooking manicured hotel lawns listening to these women’s overlapping stories, particularly when you discover that McMillan used to be a delivery driver for a local bakery company, and would deliver baked goods here.

‘Sometimes he’d make me go with him to his work,’ says Siobhan. ‘He liked to know where I was, although it didn’t work the other way. He would disappear for days on end. I know now he was with either Lynne or Charmaine.’

Being a serial cheat is not against the law, but McMillan was a serial abuser too, and a sexual deviant who was active on swinging websites.

Siobhan claims she discovered via a neighbour that he’d been showing around intimate pictures of her, taken during forced sex – ones she’d not been aware he had taken.

Charmaine discovered worse. Her images had been uploaded to a website. ‘It was Lynne who found them,’ she says. ‘They’ve been taken down now, but it’s the most vile thing in the world to think that pictures of you are out there.’

All claim McMillan – very active on dating sites which allowed him to hook up with local women – asked them to have sex with other men while he watched. None would agree.

On Thursday, at the High Court in Kilmarnock, Lord Harrower imposed an extended sentence of 14 years on McMillan – 11 to be served in prison and three on licence in the community

‘But we know that he had sex with other men because he had reviews from men on that swingers’ site, so my theory now is that he actually just hates women. What’s definite is that he is a danger to them.’

The astonishing story of how the women supported each other emerged after the guilty verdict in December when Lynne put a no-holds-barred post on Facebook about her history with her attacker.

She claims to have been inundated with messages from other women – quite apart from the two who joined her in pressing charges.

‘I’ve had about 14 women contact me,’ she says. ‘Lots of them know all about Mark McMillan.’

McMillan’s three known victims may be different in looks, but there are striking similarities in their backgrounds.

All were single mothers when McMillan moved in with them. All had terrible past experience with men. Several talk of chaotic childhoods and households where violence was simply the norm.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the bar, when it came to partners, wasn’t high.

‘I’d been abused in a previous relationship, and he knew that because it was one of the first things I told him,’ says Siobhan, who got chatting to McMillan when he came into the shop where she worked.

After discovering each others existence they swapped stories – discovering eerily parallel lives. The frequencies of the attacks on the others were not quite at the level Lynne (centre) had suffered, but the modus operandi was identical

‘He said, ‘I will treat you like a woman should be treated’. I believed him, and for the first few months it was all great. That was until the night I woke up and he’d taken my jammies off and was on top of me. He’d tied my hair around his fist, which allowed him more control. That’s how it was.’

McMillan had grown up in Stevenson in Ayrshire. Charmaine, from the same town, had known him when she was a teenager, and says she felt a bit sorry for him when they got chatting again in 2022.

‘He had a sob story about how he needed to get out of his house. I remember lending him money for a bus fare.’

Lynne, who works in a funeral directors in nearby Kilbirnie, remembers meeting him too, fleetingly, when she was a teenager but it was only when she started chatting to him again at a bus stop in January 2023 that she accepted his offer of a drink.

‘I suppose I didn’t see him as a threat because I’d known him.’

She thought he was fun, and attractive. She also knew that he was taking cocaine (and would later discover that he had drug-related debts) but ‘at the start he was lovebombing me.’

She let him move in because he was having a ‘bit of bother’ with his own house.

The first hint that she was involved with a dangerous man came within weeks – and in front of a friend.

Gisele Pelicot in October last year.Their story is reminiscent of Ms Pelicot’s own horrific ordeal

‘We were just sitting having a few drinks at home. I thought he was fooling around, going to tickle my toes and I said I hated my toes being tickled. But he just grabbed my ankles and pulled me off the sofa. I landed on my knees and he booted me up the backside and I hit my face off my friend’s knee.

‘My nose just went ‘bang’, blood everywhere. My friend said ‘what the…’ and he said ‘she needs to learn to take a joke’.’

By the February, Lynne was walking on eggshells around this man. ‘He had always been a bit possessive but he started to ask who I was messaging. He was paranoid I was with other men, yet he’d be the one messaging in the middle of the night.’

Then the rapes started. She believes he gave her a date rape drug for the first attack. ‘He just laughed afterwards and said I’d had a good time’.

The beatings were frequent, too.

‘He’d bang my head off the wall, throw trainers at me. If he was in a rage he was out of control.’

Often, her children were witness to this. ‘They knew exactly what he was like.’

There was police involvement. In the April, Lynne dialled 999. McMillan was arrested but he returned to her home. She let him in, ‘which I should not have done but you believe these men when they say they are sorry, it should not have happened’.

And this is where things became much darker. On his return, McMillan told Lynne that he would kill her if she made a further complaint.

‘He told me exactly how he’d do it, how he’d dress himself in a protective suit, cover me in cling film, stab me through it, then wrap me in a tarpaulin. It was so detailed, even down to the fact he’d put a dead dog in the grave with me, to deter any police dogs. He said it would be the perfect crime’.

By now, he was stealing from her. ‘I gave him money first. People were after him, for drug money. I wanted to help. But then I was buying him clothes, a phone.

‘One night I discovered that he was pressing my finger to my phone when I was asleep and transferring money to his own account. He took £4,000 over a few months.’

The rapes got worse. We can’t actually go into what he did to Lynne but suffice to say this wasn’t ‘just’ rape, it was sadistic torture.

‘He made a game out of it. I had to count along,’ she recalls. ‘If I didn’t let him do it he’d say we’d have to start all over again. I’m a strong person but I was sobbing in the bed and he’d tell me to shut up or he’d put a pillow over my head. I tried to cry quietly, but that’s hard.’

In July 2023, there was yet another row – this one witnessed by one of her sons – and Lynne finally asked him to leave.

He’d punched her and pushed her against a shelf, splitting her head open. Again she called the police ‘and they took him away’. The next day she retrieved his phone, and sent that fateful message to Charmaine, asking who she was.

Over the next weeks all three women swapped stories – discovering eerily parallel lives. The frequencies of the attacks on the others were not quite at the level Lynne had suffered, but the modus operandi was identical.

‘He gets inside your head,’ says Charmaine. ‘He made me feel worthless, like nobody else would want me. He’d go through my phone. I’d be saying ‘That’s my daughter’s ice dance teacher’. He’d go mad, accusing me of going with other men, and I wasn’t.’

Siobhan nods. ‘He’d call me a dirty slut, a whore. I was only texting my mum’.

If there is any hope to be gained from these women’s stories it is that they were believed as soon as they went to the police.

‘I can’t fault the police,’ says Siobhan. ‘Especially the female officers,’ says Lynne.

Yet what a world they were plunged into and still inhabit. Siobhan – who spent time in a women’s refuge – had to be rehoused because of McMillan’s attacks. All three now live in houses with panic alarms.

‘I love my new place because there’s cameras everywhere,’ she tells the others, cheerily. ‘I feel safe’.

Why, why, why did they all stay with this man for as long as they did? It’s a question mostly asked by those who have never been in abusive relationships, says Lynne.

‘His defence lawyer said, ‘Well, it can’t have been that bad, if you stayed with him’, but it’s not that easy. People like him get into your head, mess with it. He thought he could do what he liked, because men like that do.’

Until women like these speak up, it seems.

‘If I could send one message to other women it would be ‘speak up’,’ says Charmaine, as the women leave, in time for the school run.

‘You won’t be alone.’