A MOTHER of two who claims her father raped and sexually abused her as a youngster also alleged he beat her with sticks and blasted her dog with a shotgun.
The woman, now 33, told Belfast Crown Court yesterday she was too frightened to tell anyone of the abuse but after he shot her dog, she felt like killing him.
The woman is the third daughter of the 53 year old Co Tyrone father of 10 (who cannot be named for legal reasons) to give evidence against him. He denies committing 18 sex offences against his three daughters from 1972 to 1981.
The woman, at times close to tears, claimed that on one occasion her father raped her while her mother was in hospital giving birth, and on another when her mother allegedly caught him, but he pretended to have a heart attack.
Asked if she had ever tried to stop her father, she said: "You don't try and stop someone who you live in fear of, and who told you your life would be worse than what it was."
She said her father, coming home from work once in a "bad humour", said he was going to shoot her pet dog for stealing eggs.
"He got a shotgun and went outside. We started screaming and I told him not to shoot the dog. He grabbed me by the arm. He loaded the gun and shot the dog and blew the bottom part of the head off."
Later, when Mr Tony Cinnamond QC, defending, suggested her mother would say she never caught her father abusing her, or that she ever had a pet dog, she said her mother was "a liar".