Meticulous: Michael Pilgrim spent months planning an abduction.
A former aeronautical engineer who carefully planned the abduction, imprisonment and repeated rape of a woman he chained in a purpose-built soundproof room at a secluded property has pleaded guilty to multiple offences.
Michael Allen Pilgrim, 34, used false identities, restraints and weapons - knives, handcuffs and cable ties - to commit the ''horrifying'' crimes on his victim.
Highly intelligent, strongly built and well spoken, Pilgrim spent months researching and preparing to snatch the woman who he held hostage over five days last July.
He told her he wanted to hurt her but not kill her. ''No, I'm planning on keeping you here and using you,'' he said as she sat handcuffed on a mattress, her ankle padlocked to a chain attached to an eye bolt in the floor.
Pilgrim appeared in Melbourne Magistrates Court for a contested committal hearing, but pleaded guilty to 15 offences, including four rape charges, false imprisonment, stalking and abduction to detain for sexual penetration.
He was arrested in Sydney on July 20 last year, 10 days after he left his victim outside a hospital in Warragul, 100 kilometres east of Melbourne.
An investigation by the Victoria Police sexual crimes squad found Pilgrim had been a regular client of the woman, a sex worker, but grew angry with her in February 2011 after she stopped working and entered into a ''committed'' relationship.
He then created a false identity ''package'', acquired numerous items, including a stun gun, tracking devices and disguises, and researched secluded rural properties to rent.
At a house in Drouin, near Warragul, he built a soundproof room with mattresses within a small bedroom with a large metal eye bolt in the floor.
After tracking her movements on a computer from two GPS devices he attached to her car, the woman's ordeal began on July 5 when Pilgrim, disguised and armed with a stun gun, took her from a house at Frankston, south of Melbourne, in front of three friends.
The woman told police Pilgrim, holding a gun and a knife, drove away in her car and later put zip ties on her legs, shut her in the boot and then after sunset drove her handcuffed into a shed at the Drouin property.
He chained and padlocked her ankle to the floor, she said in a statement, and enclosed her in what she described as a ''cubbyhouse'' where he raped her four times while restrained.
When she fell ill on July 10, he drove her to the hospital. She could not believe he let her out of the car.
She ''actually felt sorry for the guy in the end'', she said after spending 13 days in hospital. ''I don't know why.''
Magistrate Phillip Goldberg remanded Pilgrim in custody to appear in the County Court on April 16 and ordered steps be taken to protect his wellbeing in prison.
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