Life for female coach who hid murder for 14 years
A FEMALE football coach beat a teenager to death over a £120 debt then kept silent for 14 years – even when the victim’s father was held in custody as a suspect.
Karen Tunmore, 36, was aware that Scott Pritchard’s father Fred Stacey had been wrongly accused of killing his son and was being held on remand for 16 weeks before the case collapsed through lack of evidence.
Newcastle Crown Court yesterday heard that on January 7, 2004, Tunmore, of Killingworth, North Tyneside, went looking for Scott to retrieve money she said he owed.
Scott was on crutches after breaking a foot. She smashed him over the head with a baseball bat, the court heard.
She and her accomplice, who she described to police only as “Steve”, fled the scene, leaving Scott, 19, in a pool of blood inside the back yard of his home in Sunderland.
He was found by a neighbour and rushed to hospital but could not be saved. Tunmore, who had been drinking vodka and alcopops throughout the day, was driven by her accomplice to North Shields, where she hurled the bloodied weapon into the sea.
The court heard that her first response to the news that Scott had died was to burst out laughing, before she began to feel sick.
Fred Stacey, now 63, was arrested on suspicion of murder. The roofer suffered a heart attack before Tunmore’s court case and is desperately ill. In a statement written before his collapse he describes becoming an outcast and being forced from his home, even after the case was dropped.
Tunmore kept silent until July 31 this year, when she confessed to a fellow coach before admitting the murder at a police station.
Yesterday she was jailed for life with a minimum term of 17-and-ahalf years by Judge Paul Sloan, who told her she had committed a “particularly brutal” assault.
Members of Scott’s family sobbed through the hearing.