London - Britain's youngest double murderers were yesterday sentenced to a minimum of 20 years behind bars for killing a dinner lady and her daughter in what the judge labelled as a ‘case without parallel’.
The couple were both 14 when Elizabeth Edwards, 49, and her 13-year-old daughter Katie were stabbed through their throats as they slept.
After the ‘executions’ in Spalding, Lincolnshire - with the bodies left in their beds and blood staining the walls - the couple stripped naked and had a bath.
They then spent 36 hours in the house watching Twilight vampire films, eating ice cream and having sex, before calmly giving themselves up when police arrived.
On Thursday, as he sentenced the pair - who are also Britain’s youngest killer couple - Mr Justice Haddon-Cave told them the ‘answer’ as to why they killed ‘lies in your toxic relationship’.
He described it as a ‘hermetically sealed pathetic world of your own deep, deep selfishness and immaturity, where only your feelings and desires mattered, and nobody else’s’.
Addressing a packed Nottingham Crown Court, the judge said the crime had ‘few parallels in modern criminal history’ and condemned the teens’ ‘grotesque conduct.’ He had earlier compared the pair, now both 15, to Robert Thompson and Jon Venables who were ten when they murdered James Bulger in 1993, and Mary Bell, the 11-year-old girl who killed two little boys in 1968, though she was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.
Neither of the Spalding teenagers can be named for legal reasons.
The teenagers - who were ‘besotted’ with one another and had a ‘Bonnie and Clyde-style’ relationship - had hatched the plan to kill Edwards, a churchgoer, because the girl had ‘a grudge’ against her. Her daughter was simply viewed as ‘acceptable collateral damage’, the prosecution said.
After days of planning in a McDonald’s, restaurant the boy brought a backpack full of knives to Edwards’s home. After the girl said she ‘couldn’t go through’ with killing Katie, as planned, the boy killed both mother and daughter with a kitchen knife with an 8in blade. He also smothered them.
The girl told police she could hear Edwards ‘gurgling’ and watched her ‘legs kick out’ with blood splattered across the bed, wall and floor around midnight on April 14.
The two victims were stabbed a total of ten times, with Edwards being knifed throug her jugular vein and windpipe. The boy told his girlfriend how Edwards ‘struggled’
Mr Justice Haddon-Cave said: ‘This case is, in many respects, without parallel. The killings were brutal in the form of executions and both victims, particularly Elizabeth Edwards, must have suffered terribly in the last minutes of their lives.’
During the trial, the schoolgirl showed ‘no hint of remorse’ and said Edwards ‘deserved’ to die. She admitted manslaughter on the grounds of her mental state but denied murder. However, she was found guilty of murder after a five-day trial. The boy had earlier pleaded guilty to murder.
The judge gave both of them life sentences. He there were three types of life sentences for criminals based on their age - with the minimum mandatory life sentence for under-18s only 12 years.
But he said their case had such ‘defining and particularly chilling’ features that he sentenced each to a minimum of 20 years before they would be considered for parole.
‘Had you been adults you may have been facing the whole of your lives in jail for… this rare case of double murder,’ the judge said.
‘There was remarkable premeditation and planning - it was, on any view, substantial, meticulous and repeated.’
Mr Justice Haddon-Cave added: ‘You were in it together from the beginning and planned it together. Both of you are perfectly intelligent and knew exactly what you were doing - either of you could have backed out at any time but you were selfishly determined to do it together. You then revelled in what you achieved.’
The judge read from the victim impact statement of Mary Cottingham, 27, the eldest daughter of Edwards and half-sister of Katie.
‘I can’t believe what’s happened, I’ve been thrust into the biggest nightmare of my life’, she said.
‘To find out that my mum and sister had died was bad enough, but to hear they have been victims of murder is just unbelievable.
‘I can’t get over the fact that my mum has gone. No matter how old you are you still need your mum.’
Neither the boy nor girl showed any reaction or looked at each other as they were led away from the dock. But members of the victims’ family wept in the public gallery as they were sentenced.
Earlier, Andrew Stubbs QC, defending the girl, said she was in ‘emotional turmoil’ and still ‘has to come to terms with what she has done’.
He said the couple were ‘almost playing chicken with each other’ as they spurred each other on to commit the killings and that ‘neither had the ability, stability or maturity to bring each other to their senses’.
Simon Myerson QC, defending the boy, said his client had committed the murders with his girlfriend after they became ‘trapped in a fantasy of their own devising’.
The boy was ‘in love’ with the girl and wanted to make her happy, and ‘his identity with [the girl] was so total that he viewed her simply as if she were him and he were her’.
Daily Mail