Murder.com (6 page)

Coutts physically attacked Sandra on a number of occasions. Although she was inevitably distressed by these incidents, nothing he did could compare with the ‘emotional battering’ that he constantly subjected her to. As an aside to all this terrible abuse, he told Sandra he thought it would be a good idea to get married and, as she later made clear, he was an obsessive list-maker, even going as far as to keep a record of potential wedding guests. ‘I would never have married him,’ Sandra said firmly. ‘Deep down I knew he was mad.’

In 1995, while Coutts was away on business, Sandra made an unpleasant discovery. He had, for some time, kept a locked briefcase under their bed. With him out of the house for a while,
Sandra, whose curiosity had long since got the better of her, took the opportunity to prise open the mystery case. What she found unnerved her.

Inside was a large cache of pornographic snapshots of girls ‘trussed up’. On one photograph Coutts had taken the liberty of drawing a ligature around the neck of a girl he worked with.

This doodling and doctoring of photographic images is fairly common among perverted sexual fantasists. Gerard Schaefer, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy and serial murderer whose grisly signature was to hang the girls he murdered, was shown to have kept a collection very similar to Coutts’s. Schaefer had even drawn crude nooses around the necks of models in magazines to accommodate his burgeoning preoccupation with the asphyxiation of young women.

Then there was one of Coutts’s meticulous lists with each of the girls’ names on it, all in sequence. When Sandra confronted him about this sinister trove, he reacted with typical melodrama, begging her for forgiveness and insisting that he could never harm anyone, that the pictures were just fuel for fantasies he kept safely stored in his brain. There was no danger of them ever spilling over into reality and engulfing somebody. Honestly, it was the truth. He even promised to seek help, he told her.

A few nights later, however, with the storm apparently over, Coutts wandered into the bedroom with that familiar strange look in his eye. When Sandra asked him what was wrong, she was met with a vicious punch to the eye that sent her reeling. As she lay there on the carpet, shocked and hurt, Coutts let her know that he had a strong feeling he was going to rape and kill someone before long. He then abruptly turned and left the bewildered woman where she lay.

Later, after a phone call from his father and with the deranged Coutts crying and mumbling incoherently, it was decided once and for all that he needed psychological help. Coutts, in fact, went as far as actually making an appointment but later refused to attend when he learned that the psychologist was a woman.

In the end, his doctor prescribed a course of antidepressants. But he would not take them, telling Sandra that he was worried they might negatively affect his sex drive. Despairing, Sandra finally ended her relationship with this human pressure cooker in April 1996, when her 18-year-old son Daniel died.

Daniel had absolutely despised Coutts and the intolerable atmosphere he brought to the home. The teenager spent long periods away from the house in order to escape this egotistical interloper and ultimately drifted towards crime as an outlet. Tragically, he was to fall to his death from a rooftop during a burglary. ‘I often wonder if Daniel would have turned to crime if Coutts hadn’t been living with us,’ Sandra later said. ‘He really hated him.’

Soon after Daniel’s death, and probably sensing that Coutts felt it was about time to move on to victimise someone else, Sandra ordered her partner to leave her home. Coutts readily agreed.

When he met Lisa Stephens, his love of dangerous sex games did not, of course, diminish, and through her he met Jane Longhurst. Jane fitted his fantasy-female profile to a T. From the moment he saw her, it was quite simply a case of biding his time. As the urges within this fledgling homicidal madman grew, the visage of lovely Jane Longhurst burned within him. One day he would have her. When he was finally ready to explode, her name was at the very top of his list.

After Sandra Gates’s testimony, one of the items on the agenda
at Court 1 was the reassembling of the jury at the Big Yellow Storage Company in Brighton. The prosecution wanted them to witness the conditions under which Jane’s desecrated corpse had been stashed.

Judge Richard Brown had agreed to this request for the jury to visit the premises where Jane had been left in a large cardboard box sealed with heavy-duty tape. However, the storage unit had since been rendered unusable, so they viewed the premises of a similar unit belonging to the company. Accompanied by counsel for the defence and the prosecution, they examined the kind of conditions that Coutts, under his false name of Paul Kelly, had returned to time and time again, utilising an ‘out-of-hours’ key to enter the unit and commit further atrocities on Jane’s decomposing body.

During the 13-day trial, the jury were also given a graphic demonstration by forensic scientist Roger Ide of how a pair of tights found with Jane’s corpse had been tied around her neck. To simulate this chilling act he used a plastic drinks bottle wrapped in foam and filled with water; this was to represent a human neck. He then proceeded to knot a pair of tights around the bottle.

Addressing the court, Ide suggested that Jane must have been either upright and face-to-face with her killer as he applied the ligature, or lying on her back, after concluding that a half-knot had been tied in the tights to the front side of her neck.

This image of Coutts kneeling over Jane as he strangled the life from her was a very potent one indeed. Mr Gold, for the defence, attempted to conjure a degree of co-operation between the two parties but Ide disagreed. ‘No!’ he said firmly. ‘The victim was intimidated, overpowered, or forced.’

A pathologist later told the court how she had to use scissors to cut the cruelly knotted implement of death from Jane’s neck.

Given that there was overwhelming physical evidence coupled with the numerous CCTV images of Graham Coutts’s various murder-related outings, the case really looked like it could only go one way; and a startling image captured by cameras at Big Yellow showed Coutts hefting along his trophy box. The fact that Jane Longhurst was inside it must have seared the gravity of what was being viewed into every member of the jury.

It was time next to turn to the defendant’s hoard of gruesome internet porn. The prosecution suggested an ‘obvious parallel between the images Coutts chose to access on his computer and the scene that confronted him at the storage location.’ Briefly eyeing Coutts, who sat with his head down, the prosecution turned back to the jury and added, ‘He acted out, for real, on the unfortunate Jane Longhurst, the fantasies on his computer, the strangling, the killing and the raping of her.’

Under cross-examination, Coutts maintained the fiction that all this stemmed from a mutually agreed sex game that had gone tragically wrong, and at one point he even managed to summon tears as he spoke of Jane.

The jury were unmoved.

On Wednesday, 4 February 2004, they returned a unanimous verdict: guilty of murder. Coutts displayed no visible emotion as Judge Brown quickly passed a mandatory life sentence with a recommended minimum of 30 years to serve.

And he had some final words for Graham Coutts: ‘By persisting in your denial and making her [Jane’s] loved ones relive her last moments, and the unbelievable degradation of her body, you have shown not a jot of remorse… everything that
this court has heard about Jane Longhurst shows her to have been the sort of person whose life enriched all those who came into contact with her. Her undoubted love of her partner, her music and her life screamed out of every page of evidence I have heard on this case.’

Focusing sternly on the man in the dock, he continued, ‘In seeking perverted sexual gratification by way of your sordid and evil fantasies, you have taken her life and devastated the lives of those she loved and of those who loved her.’

As Coutts was escorted from the witness box, he was jeered and shouted at by members of the gallery. There were yells for him to face Jane’s stricken family and he was called a ‘pig’ and a ‘pervert’ by Sandra Gates as he was led away to begin his new life behind bars.

After the trial, Jane’s boyfriend, Malcolm Sentance, said he had had a very difficult time in court watching as all the evidence was presented and having to ‘swallow his tongue’where Coutts, whom he described as ‘subhuman’, was concerned. In reference to the killer’s outrageous assertion that Jane had willingly submitted to his desires, Sentance said, ‘That’s the biggest insult. Coutts is a devious man. There’s no truth in anything he said from the word go. If it wasn’t for the internet, Jane would still be alive. But until 50 women are rounded up, raped and murdered I don’t suppose anyone will act. I hope Coutts doesn’t kill himself. I want him to suffer for 30 years.’

Jane’s mother, Liz Longhurst, said Coutts was ‘vile and disgusting’. Seventy-two-year-old Mrs Longhurst, who had sat in court throughout the trial, described her daughter as a beautiful person who was loved by everybody who knew her. She said, ‘Today is a relief for us all. We have had one of the most difficult
years that we have had to endure.’ As Mrs Longhurst continued fighting back her tears, she said, ‘I feel pressure should be brought to bear on internet service providers to close down or filter out these pornographic sites, so that people like Jane’s killer may no longer feed their sick imaginations.’ She added, ‘They [internet service providers] must take some responsibility. Hopefully, we can now campaign to end this despicable use of the soul.’

Sandra Gates, who had endured the monster for far too long, commented, ‘I was shocked but not surprised that he finally killed someone.’

Indeed, considering how deeply entrenched his fantasies were, it is extremely likely that, if undetected, Coutts would have gone on to kill again and again to satisfy his terrible lust for dead females.

‘I tried to make him seek help but he wouldn’t,’ Sandra continued. ‘Now a lovely girl is dead. Everyone says it could have been me.’ She ended by saying, ‘He is an evil, perverted psychopath and is where he belongs, in prison. Hopefully, he will never be able to hurt another woman again.’

Detective Chief Inspector Steve Dennis, who had led the case, was in complete agreement, saying that ‘a very dangerous man’ had been removed from society.

Looking back into Graham Coutts’s recent history, it is possible to see a warning of a tragedy to come. Seven years before murdering Jane Longhurst, he had unceremoniously intruded into the life of a lady named Georgina Langridge, and she had never forgotten it.

When Mrs Langridge caught Coutts secretly filming her daughters in a changing cubicle at a public swimming pool, she
yelled at him. He had been poking the camera over the top of the cubicle, videoing her daughters as they undressed. Confronted by the irate mother, the Peeping Tom fled but was quickly arrested by police after poolside staff contacted them.

Subsequently, he was charged with the offence but was later acquitted by magistrates. On learning of this, Mrs Langridge was swift in writing to them. Her letter shows remarkable foresight into the misdeeds of a fledgling sexual criminal. In part of her letter, she had angrily written, ‘History often proves that this type of behaviour continues, you now have to look to yourselves… and therefore accept responsibility for any further offences this person will commit.’

After the trial, Liz Longhurst would have a meeting with then Home Secretary David Blunkett, who was very keen to stamp out violent online pornography. Following a brief investigation, it was agreed that Blunkett would take his findings to the USA and call for a clampdown on sick internet websites, the view being taken that the two countries are jointly responsible for the spirit of lawlessness. After a meeting with the Deputy Attorney General, Jim Comey, it was agreed that they should take this step.

The Home Office has claimed that websites devoted to necrophilia are rare but did warrant action. (The authors can confirm that there are more of these sites than most people would like to believe.)

The Home Office official spokesman said, ‘We have agreed that a specific group of officials would meet jointly to work out what the next stage would be. We agreed that we would put our heads together to get some action on the issue. The Deputy Attorney General said it was something they had been
increasingly concerned about. Experts make clear however that this kind of manoeuvre can be difficult legally, especially if sites are hosted overseas.’

The head of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit recently said that websites devoted to necrophilia and cannibalism are ‘corrupting vulnerable people and should be closed’. Chief Superintendent Len Hynds, who heads the unit, says, ‘For the internet to continue to grow as a mainstream medium for businesses, education and entertainment, it must design out the minority factors that inhabit cyberspace for their own perverse gratification.’

But, as one IT security manager has commented, ‘On the pragmatic side, just how do they think that this can be enforced – it wasn’t christened the “worldwide web” without good reason. Like all “vices” they will always find an outlet and a supplier for the depraved and corrupt in society. Let’s stop wasting our time and effort on what we can’t control and go for the organised crime syndicates that peddle this filth.’

The Internet Watch Foundation also warned that, from a legal position, a complete cessation of these kinds of sites could be very complicated. ‘At the IWF we do sometimes receive complaints about websites and material which contains adult content, but unless they are hosted in the UK and may potentially be “borderline extreme” in terms of content, i.e. it is unclear as to whether the images may be illegal, it is not within our remit to further investigate these sites.’

A further statement read, ‘Due to the increasing diversity in social attitudes, “adult” content, the context in which it is viewed and possessed and any “influence” it may have, is very difficult to govern.’

While society is now protected from Graham Coutts, the myriad deviant websites he habitually patronised are still fully accessible. It seems that Mr Blunkett and Mr Comey have not had quite the impact on internet-based purveyors of violent pornography that they intended.