Fife rapist who regarded sex with women as ‘his right’ jailed for nine years

Scott Tullis, from Methil will remain under close supervision for four years following his release from prison because of the risk he is assessed of posing to women.

He was also told his name would remain on the sex offenders’ register indefinitely and he was banned from approaching or contacting two of his victims – one of them a 13-year-old girl – for the next 15 years.

Tullis, 31, was sentenced at the High Court in Livingston on Monday after earlier being convicted of attacking two women – one of them multiple times – and indecently assaulting the teenager. A jury at Stirling High Court heard the accused was just 16 himself when he targeted his youngest victim in 2009.

Now 28, she said she “hadn’t even kissed a boy before” when “muscular” Tullis “cornered” her in a wooded clearing in Burntisland. She tried to shove him off but he put his hand behind her neck and sexually assaulted her on a rock. He told her not to tell anyone, before getting on a motorbike and riding away.

“In shock, in panic and very upset” the girl went quickly to the home of a school friend who lived nearby. Later on the night of the incident in July 2009 she told her mother who phoned police.

Tullis, now an air conditioning engineer, went on to repeatedly rape another woman at addresses in Cardenden, Methil and Ballingry, and in Comrie, Perthshire.

Between 2015 and 2020, the jury was told he raped her twice while she was asleep and incapable of giving consent and on other occasions when she was awake. The woman gave evidence that he physically assaulted her, threatened and abused her, and “persistently” and repeatedly demanded sex.

His victim, now 34, said Tullis was “a man without boundaries, a man without shame, who believed sex was his right”.

Tullis attacked his third victim, a 22-year-old female, in Kirkcaldy in April 2021, seizing her by the neck, biting her thigh, raping her and headbutting her in the face. She recalled that she felt her “eyes roll back in her head” when he compressed her neck.

The court heard Tullis had been charming to his victims at first, before going on to “display his true colours as a violent sexual abuser”.

Jurors deliberated for two full days before finding the accused guilty of five charges of rape, one of indecent assault, one of assault to injury, one of behaving in a threatening and abusive manner and one of engaging in a course of domestic abuse. A charge of assaulting the 22-year-old woman to the danger of her life by compressing her neck was found not proven.

Tullis was also acquitted of another charge of assault after the jury found him not guilty.

He hung his head in the dock as the verdicts were announced and was remanded in custody while background reports were prepared before sentencing.

Allan MacLeod, defending, said Tullis had never been in jail before and did not have any previous convictions for sexual offending.

Relatives of the accused reacted with shock and surprise in the courtroom when Judge Lord Young handed down the lengthy prison sentence.