A “man without shame” is behind bars after raping women in Perthshire and Fife.
Scott Tullis, 31, was said to regard sex as his right as he was convicted of attacking two women – one of them multiple times – and indecently assaulting a teenage girl.
Tullis was just 16 when he targeted his youngest victim.
Now 28, she told High Court in Stirling she was 13 and “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 and the same night, told her mother who phoned police.
The incident happened in July 2009.
‘Violent sexual abuser’
Tullis, now an air conditioning engineer, went on to repeatedly rape another woman at addresses in Cardenden, Methil and Ballingry in Fife and Comrie in Perthshire.
Between 2015 and 2020, he raped her twice when she was asleep and on other occasions when she was awake.
He physically assaulted her, threatened and abused her, and “persistently” and repeatedly demanded sex.
The woman, 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, in Kirkcaldy, in April 2021, seizing her by the neck, biting her thigh, raping her and headbutting her in the face.
She alleged she felt her “eyes roll back in her head” when he compressed her neck.
The court heard Tullis had been initially charming to his victims, before going on to “display his true colours as a violent sexual abuser”.
Guilty
After five days of evidence, jurors deliberated for two full days before finding father-of-two Tullis, of Methil, 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.
Additionally, Tullis was found not guilty of another charge of assault.
He hung his head in the dock as the verdicts were announced on Wednesday.
Allan MacLeod, defending, said Tullis had never been in jail before and did not have any previous convictions for sexual offending.
Judge Lord Young remanded him in custody for reports until April 11, when he will be sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow, and placed him on the Sex Offenders Register.
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