A Moldovan man has received a life sentence for the “evil and depraved” rape and attempted murder of a stranger whom he left to die in an alleyway. Sergiu Boianjiu, who came to Britain after serving 10 years for killing his girlfriend, was caught on CCTV in February as he raped and repeatedly stamped on the head of a woman in Northamptonshire. Footage recovered by police also showed Boianjiu, who believed he had killed the victim, leaving the scene to fetch a wheelie bin in an effort to try to hide her body. The images also showed the badly injured woman – whom Boianjiu wanted to “eliminate” as a potential witness – being discovered by a passerby after lying in the rain and cold for several hours. The woman suffered a life-threatening brain injury in the 40-minute attack, which happened at about 5am near a church in the town of Wellingborough as she walked home from a night out. The two-week trial at Northampton crown court heard that the woman could remember nothing of the ordeal, described by prosecutors as acts of “desolating wickedness”. Jurors unanimously convicted Boianjiu of attempted murder and a count of rape last month. He was found not guilty of a second rape charge, having already admitted attempted rape. Jailing Boianjiu for a minimum period of 26 years on Friday, the judge, David Herbert KC, told him: “You repeatedly stamped on her head whilst she remained unconscious. “It it clear from the evidence that after delivering a further six blows you believed you had successfully killed her.” Herbert said the evidence showed Boianjiu, 38, was thinking clearly as he tried to cover up the offence at the scene, searching for evidence that may incriminate him. He added: “Your offending is aggravated by a conviction for intentional murder in Moldova. My assessment of you from all the evidence before me is that you are an extremely dangerous man.” Despite Boianjiu’s lawyers attempting to prevent jurors from hearing any details of his previous crimes, evidence was ruled admissible after a legal argument, with the jury hearing that the defendant had been found guilty of theft from a school and the “deliberate murder” of 19-year-old Ludmila Nour in 2002. Nour’s body had been hidden in a drainage shaft in a forest. A translation of a record of Boianjiu’s 2009 murder trial at Moldova’s Rîșcani district court described Boianjiu hitting Nour “several times with his hands and feet”, before throwing her dead body into a drainage shaft and fleeing the scene, a park in the county of Chișinău. His trial also heard that just hours before the offences, Boianjiu was observed groping women in a nightclub. Jurors were also told that Boianjiu, a former school caretaker, was only extradited back to Moldova in 2008, having travelled to Moscow and Vladivostok in Russia. Boianjiu was released early from a 14-year sentence on 6 July 2018, but the trial was not told how or when he entered the UK, or what checks were done to establish his past history. During his closing speech to the jury, prosecutor Gordon Aspden KC said: “The ugly truth here is that this exceptionally dangerous man, for his own selfish reasons, chose to carry out an attack of quite desolating wickedness against a complete stranger. “His intention was to rape and ultimately to kill her. His behaviour was evil and depraved.”