Worker ‘killed his boss and wrote “bully” on her head’
A UNIVERSITY worker who became obsessed with his female boss stabbed her to death and wrote “bully” across her forehead, a court heard yesterday.
David Browning is said to have left Samaritans volunteer Jillian Howell covered in blood on her lounge floor after stabbing her repeatedly in the chest, neck and abdomen.
Browning stayed in the house for “several hours” before dialling 999 around 6am on October 26 last year to say he was outside a police station and had tried to kill himself.
Officers found he had a gun and a knife but was “calm, coherent and collected”, jurors were told. When asked what happened by the officers, he replied “I have killed my boss”.
The 52-year-old is accused of murdering the single woman, who was his superior in the University of Brighton payroll department.
He had formed an “intense attachment” to Ms Howell when she tried to help him with his depression.
Browning directed officers to Ms Howell’s Brighton home where they found her body with the word bully scrawled across her forehead and graffiti across the walls.
The married father of two denies murder but admits manslaughter by diminished responsibility, claiming his actions were prompted by depression brought on by his father’s death a year earlier.
Prosecutor Alan Gardner told the court Browning had worked in the payroll department since 1989 and first met Ms Howell when she joined as a manager in 2015.
He was her deputy and had “expressed unhappiness” at her management style but the pair became friends and started seeing each other from June last year, Hove Crown Court in East Sussex heard.
Ms Howell told friends she was trying to “cheer up” a colleague by inviting him for dinner and hoped her experience with the suicide support charity would help.
Mr Gardner said Browning bought her gifts and flowers. In text messages Browning described her as “stunning” and another said: “I adore you personally and professionally”.
She told a friend she sought professional help for Browning after he demanded she “must never leave the university or get a boyfriend as he needed her”, Mr Gardner said.
Browning, of Seaford, East Sussex, claimed he suffered an “abnormality of function” but Mr Gardner branded it a “premeditated, cold blooded murder”.
Browning claims he stabbed Ms Howell after she urged him to go to hospital when he said he had posted suicide notes.
Graffiti on the walls, allegedly written by Browning, tried to implicate her close friend Sean McDonald – a former mayor of Worthing.
Mr Gardner called it a “carefully planned murder out of jealously and out of anger”.
The trial continues.