Antiques dealer jailed for life for strangling daughter
back.” She added: “I always think to myself, if Robert was ill, why didn’t he kill himself? Why did he kill my innocent daughter who had done nothing to him?” Peters, a former Israeli soldier, waited for his wife to leave their £1million home in Wimbledon, south-west London, before strangling Sophia as she lay in bed. Jurors heard how when bewildered Sophia asked her father: “What are you doing?”, he simply replied “Sorry” and continued strangling her.
After the hearing Detective Inspector Helen Rance said: “We may never truly understand why Robert Peters carried out this vile crime.”
Peters, who was having an affair, researched child killers online but kept his murderous plans secret from authorities, the court was told.
He called 999 to report what he had done and the little girl was rushed to hospital but died the following day.
The killing came just over a month after Peters was found not to be a risk by a child protection team in the London borough of Merton, despite two suicide attempts in 2017.
Jailing him for life, Mr Justice Edis said: “It is impossible to imagine the last few conscious minutes of that child’s life. She was a lovely little girl who loved her parents and thought that they loved her.”
The Old Bailey heard Peters’ second wife Francine claimed he tried to strangle her during several episodes of domestic violence between 1994 and 2009. Gabriel, with wife Meabh, inset, met the Pope before his announcement singer, 68, has teamed up with medical experts to create The Tap. The service would bring together the latest technology from thousands of companies to monitor health or treat conditions such as stroke, cancer or cardiovascular disease at home. People could potentially download tumour-busting electrical fields to prevent the abnormal cell division behind cancer, or low frequency ultrasound to boost wound healing. The twice-married father-of-four revealed the extent of his wife’s illness at the International Unite to Cure Conference in Vatican City, where the couple met the Pope. He said: “The idea is to create a platform that would allow new types of medicine to be streamed to the home so that the home becomes the treatment centre. “Streamed medicine is about to hit, so let’s accelerate it and make sure the experts start talking to each other so it’s all in one place.”