WEARING nothing but a balaclava over his head, a man creeps around Cooks Hill in the middle of the night before confronting a 71-year-old woman outside her home.
It's 3.40am on March 2, 2025 and the woman had just woken from a bad dream to a terrifying reality as the man begins performing a disgusting sexual act in front of her.
Then, about a month later, a man begins following a 21-year-old woman as she walks down Beaumont Street after work.
It is 11.30pm and CCTV footage had captured him driving up and down the popular restaurant strip before spotting the woman walking alone and then following her on foot.
But as the woman crosses the railway line into Islington, she notices the man behind her.
Uncomfortable, she crosses over to the other side of the road and quickens her pace, but the man follows her all the way home.
When she reached her front yard, the woman turns to see him hiding behind a pole, his pants removed and a covering over his face.
Again, the man performs a sexual act while staring at the woman.
Horrified, the woman knocks desperately at her front door to be let inside.
But the man is not done, he walks right up to the woman's bedroom window and, still naked from the waist down and masturbating, he stands there.
It's not until the woman yells out "what the f--- are you doing," that the stranger is startled and runs away without his pants.
A few months later another woman gets a notification on her phone that the motion sensor on the CCTV outside her home in Hamilton South had activated during the night.
She watches a video that shows a man pull up in a car about 3.15am, climb through the bushes outside her home and stand in her front yard.
Then, as a pedestrian walks on the opposite side of the road, the man pulls down his pants, pulls his shirt over his face, and begins masturbating.
The series of deeply troubling and predatory sexual acts committed against women across Newcastle were not linked to one man until late July last year, nearly five months after the first incident at Cooks Hill.
But the Newcastle Herald can reveal that the man responsible was Daniel James Blake, 42, a vagrant living out of his car in the Maitland area.
Blake was expected to deny all the charges and face a hearing but on Wednesday in Newcastle Local Court he pleaded guilty to two counts of carrying out sexual acts towards others without consent, indecent exposure and entering inclosed lands.
Blake's admissions came after the DPP agreed to withdraw a number of other similiar charges, including multiple counts of willful and obscene exposure and carrying out sexual acts without consent.
He remains behind bars and will be sentenced in August.
Blake was initially arrested and charged over the Hamilton South offences a few days after appearing on the motion censor CCTV.
He was granted bail, but was arrested again a month later and taken behind bars after investigators linked him to the earlier attacks.
