Glenn Gary Cameron, better known as the "Night Stalker" or "Moore Park Rapist", is being sentenced after DNA analysis unearthed him living in Alice Springs.
Between 1991 and 1993, he lured women to secluded parts of Sydney's Moore Park and the inner west before attacking them.
"If you don't let me do this, I will kill you," Cameron told one of the women, according to court documents.
In the NSW District Court on Monday, his lawyer set out a troubled upbringing, including being orphaned aged six and being subjected to instances of serious childhood abuse.
He became "quite an angry (and) defiant person" in his early teenage years, abused substances, reported being a loner and had been recently diagnosed with a stress-related mental health disorder, she said.
But Judge John Pickering questioned how that mitigated culpability for premeditated, violent sexual assaults on eight different women.
"A (chronic) adjustment disorder is not really a significant finding ... it just describes what someone was going through in their life at the time," the judge said.
"There has to be some meaning as to why I would give any reduction to his moral culpability."
The judge dismissed a submission that the sense of power the attacks provided Cameron was "driven to some extent from his upbringing and experiences".
"That's a fairly extreme position - that he felt he needed to commit premeditated sexual assault," Judge Pickering said.
"Thank God he's only one of the very few men who has that feeling within him."
In a letter to the court, Cameron, now 62, expressed remorse and said he had carried the guilt of his "heinous" crimes for more than 30 years, sucking the happiness out of good moments in his life.
"I wish I could explain my actions … to bring some closure to the pain but I really can't," the letter read to the court said.
"If anyone said I was a good man, I knew deep down I wasn't."
After the serial rapes, Cameron blended back into society, moving to South Australia and raising a family.
A revived police investigation in the 2020s linked four of the sexual assaults to a single male DNA profile and a familial match.
A stealth operation to swipe the Alice Springs resident's glass and fork at an airport in 2024 for DNA analysis then unmasked the funeral director.
He was arrested in February 2024.
Cameron pleaded guilty to 13 charges, with another 14 to be taken into consideration when he is sentenced.
Nine charges - including that Cameron punched two women in the head, hit another in the face multiple times and robbed two women - were withdrawn by prosecutors in September 2025.
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