A young woman who entered a Miss Hitler beauty pageant is facing jail after she was convicted of being a member of a banned far-Right group.
Alice Cutter, 23, was found guilty yesterday alongside her former fiance, Mark Jones, 25, following a retrial.
The pair were members of National Action, which was described as a ‘racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic organisation’ when it was banned by then home secretary Amber Rudd in 2016, following the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a Right-wing extremist.
It made being a member illegal, punishable by up to ten years in prison.
Jurors at Birmingham Crown Court were told Cutter had entered the sick beauty competition under the name Miss Buchenwald – a reference to the Second World War death camp.
Cutter, from Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax, West Yorkshire, had pleaded not guilty to being a member of National Action. She said she was an animal-loving vegan with a passion for European architecture and classical art who was pressured by friends into entering the beauty pageant.
But in a series of vile messages read to the jury, she was exposed as a bigoted young woman obsessed with ‘ethnic cleansing’, who was still meeting other National Action members months after the ban.
Prosecutors said Cutter, who joked about gassing synagogues and using a Jew’s head as a football, had been a ‘central spoke’ among the organisation’s hard-core, and entered the pageant to drive recruitment.
The court heard she attended meetings with group leaders and posed for a Nazi salute on the steps of Leeds Town Hall in 2016. In one exchange with another National Action member the day after Mrs Cox was murdered, she said: ‘Rot in hell, bitch.’
Cutter met Jones, a joiner from London, online shortly after entering the Miss Hitler competition in 2016, sending him a message saying he was a ‘badass’ after he was photographed giving a Nazi salute on a visit to the Buchenwald camp in Germany. The pair got engaged on a visit to Fountains Abbey, near Ripon in North Yorkshire, and moved in together in a £320-a-month flat in Sowerby Bridge.
In the flat, police found knives as well as pictures showing the couple posing in his and hers swastika jumpers.
Cutter and Jones held hands as they appeared in the dock at their first trial last year.
But their relationship soured when it emerged in Jones’s evidence that he had been cheating on Cutter, who broke down in tears and removed her engagement ring. The jury in their first trial was discharged after failing to reach a verdict.
Yesterday, Jones and Cutter embraced in the dock as the guilty verdicts were returned following a ten-week trial.
Garry Jack, 24, of Birmingham, and Connor Scothern, 19, from Nottingham, were also found guilty yesterday. All four were remanded in custody to be sentenced at a later date. Judge Paul Farrer QC told them: ‘You have all been convicted of a serious terrorist offence.’