A SEX fiend who raped two university students and indecently assaulted another at knifepoint more than 16 years ago has been jailed for life.

Labourer Paul Collings was told he must serve at least seven-and-a-half years before being considered for release.

He almost got away scot free but was trapped years later by advances in DNA evidence.

A judge at Maidstone Crown Court told the balding married father-of-two that he was a "deviant predator" and a danger to all women.

Judge Warwick McKinnon added: "As a sexually deviant predator you deliberately chose university campuses, where you prowled around looking for young female undergraduates alone in their rooms at night.

"It is incalculable to comprehend how your victims must have felt when you engaged them in conversation, believing they were about to be raped and not knowing whether they would be left alive.

"The harrowing ordeals suffered has had a profound and devastating effect on their lives and you have shown no remorse, but rather a callous disregard of your victims."

Collings, now 39, protested as he was led away to start his sentence: "I didn't do it."

The court heard that he carried out the attacks at Kent University, Canterbury, and Sussex University at Falmer, near Brighton, in October and December 1989.

He denied two charges of rape and two of indecent assault, despite overwhelming evidence that it was a one in a billion chance that the DNA found came from someone else.

Judge McKinnon gave the prosecution leave to put Collings's previous convictions before the jury. They included an indecent assault at knifepoint and indecent exposure.

One of the victims was a 22-year-old American student, who had been in the UK less than 24 hours when she was raped at Sussex University.

Anthony Haycroft, prosecuting, said the three women were all asleep on campus when they woke up in terror to find Collings kneeling by their beds with a knife.

DNA samples were obtained and tests concluded that the attacks were committed by the same man. But it was not until 2004 that he was identified as Collings.

Mr Haycroft said the likelihood of the DNA sample belonging to someone else was one in one billion. "And that is erring on the side of caution," he added.

Collings, of Icklesham, Winchelsea, East Sussex, denied rape and indecent assault on one victim in October 1989 at Sussex University and indecent assault of the second victim and rape of the third victim at Kent University on the same night in December that year.