County Court Judge Liz Gaynor said the man, 40, had had significant mental health problems for many years, including a preoccupation with witchcraft.

The judge said the man had been admitted to a psychiatric unit in 1999 after ‘‘exhibiting grandiose and bizarre delusions about reincarnation, that your parents were replaced by imposters who were actually witches, beliefs about the CIA and FBI, and described having a hit list with drug addicts’ names on it’’.

The man, 40, who has been taking anti-psychotic medication for the past seven years since being diagnosed with schizophrenia, pleaded guilty on Monday to three counts of rape and three counts of indecent assault on two women.

The first attack took place in the early hours of July 3, 2012, when the man went to the house of a 60-year-old woman, a former neighbour of his parents, and called out her name.

The woman went to her window and asked, ‘‘What’s wrong?’’

The man replied, ‘‘Everything.’’

The woman let the man into her house and he told her, ‘‘I’ve loved you for years’’, before trying to kiss her.

‘‘You then said, ‘I love you, please can’t we do this?’, and she said no,’’ Judge Gaynor told the man when jailing him for eight years with a non-parole period of five years.

After raping and indecently assaulting the woman, the man told her as he was leaving, ‘‘This will be our little secret.’’

On July 26, 2012, the man’s second victim was at home with her five-year-old daughter and went to sleep at about midnight.

The woman, a friend of the man’s de facto partner, was woken at about 4am by the man banging on her bedroom window and calling out her name.

‘‘She let you in through the front door and you walked straight into the kitchen where [the woman] made you coffee and gave you a cigarette,’’ Judge Gaynor said.

‘‘You then pulled down the back of [the woman’s] pyjama pants and pushed her on to the kitchen bench ... [The woman] was terrified because she did not know what you were capable of and her daughter was asleep in her bed.’’

When later interviewed by police, the man admitted the woman had told him ‘‘no’’ before he raped her but claimed she was just being ‘‘hard to get’’.

‘‘I note from the psychiatric material that you have historically shown very little insight into your psychiatric illness, the major effect of which you describe as making you angry,’’ the judge told the man.

‘‘You need to understand very clearly that you have committed violent sexual acts against two women known to you, in their homes, and against their will.

‘‘Whatever the mitigation, at the end of the day I am left to sentence you for appalling offending where your victims were exploited and degraded by you.

‘‘You have degraded, humiliated and terrified two entirely innocent women who must deal with the long-lasting traumatic effects flowing from the sexual violence they experienced at your hands.’’