Homeless man who butchered woman and son who’d taken him in may never be freed from jail
A HOMELESS drug user who brutally murdered a woman and her 13-year-old son in a frenzied knife attack after she had tried to help him has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 30 years.
Aaron Barley dressed in black and armed himself with a kitchen knife when he crept inside the Wilkinson family’s home in Stourbridge, West Midlands, on March 30.
In the violent attack that followed, Barley repeatedly knifed defenceless Tracey Wilkinson in bed 17 times and stabbed her son Pierce in his room eight times.
Barley, who also left Mrs Wilkinson’s husband Peter for dead in the assault, was sentenced yesterday by a High Court judge at Birmingham Crown Court.
Jailing him, Mrs Justice Carr told Barley he had carried out “a vicious and unprovoked attack” in the home where he had once been welcomed.
She added he had gone to the house and “lay in wait” in the garden before creeping inside the unlocked home, going upstairs and launching a “violent and sustained assault, involving severe force”.
The 24-year-old did not react when told he “may never be released” after admitting two counts of murder and another of attempted murder.
The judge told Barley: “You abused your knowledge of the family home, which you had only gained through the Wilkinsons’ extraordinary kindness and generosity to you.
“Mrs Wikinson and Pierce, only 13, were in bed at home, where they were entitled to feel and should have been safe.
“You have shown no remorse — indeed only regret that Mr Wilkinson survived his injuries and at times satisfaction in what you did achieve.
“You knew that you were destroying the family. It is what you intended.
“Your conduct involved a very significant degree of planning and premeditation, at least so far as the attack on Mr Wilkinson was concerned.
“You broke into the grounds of the house in the very early hours. You emerged from the garden in black disguise, even covering your coloured trainers with black socks.”
The judge added: “The Wilkinson family, and in particular Mrs Wilkinson, had done nothing but their best to help you.
“Mr and Mrs Wilkinson were both financially and emotionally generous to you. “You betrayed their trust in every way, exploiting the knowledge of their household. It is difficult to imagine what went through Mrs Wilkinson and Pierce’s minds when you attacked them but they must have been bewildered and terrified. “One of them, at least, must have been aware of the stabbing of the other.”
Barley had been taken in by the family after 50-year-old Mrs Wilkinson spotted him sleeping rough at a supermarket in the spring of 2016.
They helped the unemployed cannabis-smoker get accommodation, fed him, and paid for a mobile phone contract.
Mr Wilkinson (47) even got him a job at one of his businesses in Newport, south Wales.
But Barley left his role without notice after falsely claiming his mother had died.
In October last year Mr Wilkinson returned home from work to find Barley sleeping on his driveway, after which the family briefly allowed him to stay with them before the council found alternative housing. Less than a week before the stabbings, the Wilkinsons cancelled the mobile phone contract.
The judge described the “chilling” security camera footage, recovered from the family home, showing Barley “crawling” on all fours around the Wilkinsons’ back garden moments before attacking.
The judge said Mr Wilkinson and his 19-year-old daughter Lydia — away at university at the time of the attack — had been left with “understandable anger” and distress over remorseless Barley’s actions.
On Tuesday, after Barley first admitted the killings, student Miss Wilkinson faced him down in court, telling him: “I will never forgive you.”