A fitness instructor who stalked and raped a charity worker and then kidnapped her baby son, was jailed for 13-and-a-half years today.

Jordan Shodeke launched his “campaign of terror” after the trusting woman befriended him and tried to find him a job.

Inner London Crown Court heard he repaid her kindness with an invitation for a drink that turned into a nightmare of fear and pain when he suddenly “threw her over his shoulder”, imprisoned her in her home and then forced himself upon her.

As she begged and screamed for him to stop “he put his hands around her neck for several minutes until she began … to lose consciousness”, said Karen Holt, prosecuting.

Afterwards he tracked her down again, “called her incessantly”, often turning up unannounced at her work and repeatedly threatening to hurt or kill her.

Then, a week after she gave birth to her son, he confronted her in the street, grabbed the child like a “rag doll” and yanked him from his pushchair.


Seconds later he punched the young mother to the ground, hit her heavily pregnant sister in the stomach and then turned on her brother-in-law when he rushed to their aid.

After fleeing with the screaming infant he phoned, threatening to throw him into a canal, but ended up dumping him in the dingy stairwell of a block of flats instead.

Her ordeal left her so traumatised she fled abroad to make a new life for herself and her son.

The court heard his arrest prompted a police probe which found he had subjected a second woman to a “lengthy course of harassment”, bombarding her with up to 50 texts and 100 phone calls a day, visiting her work and repeatedly threatening her family.

Crop-haired Shodeke, 26, of Cotton Gardens, Kennington, south London, claimed his first victim had consented to sex, and then, like the second woman he stalked, had lied repeatedly.

But he was convicted of rape, false imprisonment, actual bodily harm, kidnap, common assault, and causing fear of violence by harassment to his two victims between December 2006 and October 2007.

Passing sentence, Judge Nicholas Philpot said while “the probability of further offences against women is high” there was still not enough evidence to conclude he posed “a significant risk to members of the public”.

He said the offences against the woman he raped involved “planning, abduction, detention and use of force” as well as a period of harassment.

“I think it likely that in time, perhaps a long time, she will get over this experience but the impact statement discloses that for the moment she has been seriously affected in her relationships with men.

“She has felt obliged to make a new life abroad,” he added.