A US airman who preyed on sleeping and intoxicated women in a series of attacks across East Anglia has been jailed in the United States after British police handed key parts of the investigation to the US military.
James Loubeau, 38, was convicted in a Miami court last year of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old American servicewoman on a military base in England. Prosecutors said he believed he could attack with “impunity”. He received five years in prison and will be monitored for two decades after release because of the risk he poses.
Pattern of attacks
Court papers describe an “assaultive spree” between April and July 2019 involving six women in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Three were US personnel stationed with him at RAF Mildenhall. The others were British.
Two of those British women went to Suffolk police in August 2019. They said they met Loubeau and another airman in a nightclub in the market town of Bury St Edmunds. The men offered them a lift home, but instead drove to Mildenhall and gave them wine and Disaronno in plastic cups. The women woke around 6.30am naked and confused, with no memory of what had happened. Both believed they had been raped.
Jurisdiction questions
Eleven days after the report, Suffolk police transferred the investigation to US military police. Under a 1951 agreement, the American military can claim cases involving US personnel as victims or when the accused is on duty. For off-duty crimes against British civilians on UK soil, local police normally hold primacy.
The military investigation covered multiple alleged victims. Loubeau faced a court-martial in 2020 over an American servicewoman who said he broke into her locked bedroom and assaulted her while she was “in and out of consciousness”. He was acquitted.
Discharge and FBI involvement
He was later discharged “under honourable conditions” for minor infractions that included making sexual advances to drunk women and using derogatory language. He returned to the US. An FBI investigation later linked him through DNA to the 19-year-old. She had met him at a base bar; later that night, he slipped his hand through her open window, unlatched the door and climbed on top of her at 2.30am.
Prosecutors used the wider pattern of attacks—including the British cases—to argue he had targeted sleeping or drunk women in a brazen series of crimes.
Other alleged victims
A third British woman alleged Loubeau assaulted her in her Cambridgeshire home in April 2019. Cambridgeshire police found insufficient evidence and said the victim did not support a prosecution, though they worked with US authorities.
Suffolk police have declined to explain why they ceded jurisdiction so quickly. They are now reviewing the decision and their case-transfer practices, a process understood to have been prompted by reporting by The Guardian. The US air force military police directed questions back to Suffolk. Loubeau’s lawyer declined to comment.
The conviction 4,000 miles from the alleged crimes has intensified scrutiny of how US service personnel accused of serious offences in Britain are sometimes removed from the reach of UK courts.
