Ultimate betrayal of kindness
Teenager confronts homeless addict who killed her mother and brother after family took him in
A TEENAGER yesterday confronted in a courtroom the drug addict who killed her brother and mother.
Lydia Wilkinson, 19, said her life had been ‘obliterated’ by Aaron Barley after her family took him under their wing.
Looking directly at the 24-year-old killer in the dock, she told him: ‘My parents helped you – you repaid them with destruction and heartache. You have obliterated my life, murdered half my family, very nearly all it, and for this I will never forgive you.
‘I was confident and enjoyed life but now grief has taken over. Grief has ruined me. To see the stairs at home, to walk the last path they took tears me up inside.’
Barley yesterday admitted knifing to death her mother, Tracey, 50, and brother, Pierce, 13, at the start of his trial. He had already pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of her father, Peter, 47. The businessman was left for dead in the back garden of their £440,000 home.
The attack took place a few weeks after Barley’s former foster carer warned police of his increasingly threatening Facebook messages.
He had vowed to ‘take down his family and was wondering how many he could get before he was caught’. Another disturbing message read: ‘Got to try and get some help before I go on a killing spree.’
Barley spent most of yesterday’s hearing in the glass-panelled dock with his head bowed, yards from where Miss Wilkinson sat with her boyfriend and father. But when the student, who escaped the carnage because she was away at Bristol University, entered the witness box to deliver a victim impact statement, their eyes met and he appeared to well up.
The court was told Barley attacked her mother and brother in their bedrooms after lying in wait in the grounds of their home for up to nine hours.
CCTV footage showed him crawling over the rear lawn between hiding places as he waited for Mr Wilkinson to take his greyhound for her morning walk.
Wearing a mask and gloves, he then entered the property through the unlocked kitchen door.
Mrs Wilkinson’s naked body was discovered by the bed, a bloodied knife wrapped in the sheets.
Pierce was discovered crawling along his bedroom floor by paramedics, struggling to breathe and unable to talk. He went into cardiac arrest and was declared dead in hospital.
When Mr Wilkinson returned from his walk, Barley pounced in the kitchen, repeatedly stabbing him in the head, chest and back. The struggle moved on to the lawn, with the drug addict frenziedly stabbing the company director and screaming, ‘die you b******’.
Barley escaped from the house in the family’s Land Rover but Mr Wilkinson was able to dial 999 and give his name to police.
He was caught nearby after crashing into a wall following a short police chase. Three months before the murders, Barley had spent Christmas lunch with the family and gave Mrs Wilkinson a card addressed to ‘ the mother I never had’.
Yesterday, her husband told reporters he wished she had ‘never set eyes’ on the drifter who she tried to rescue from addiction and homelessness. Mr Wilkinson suffered six stab wounds in the attack this March in Stourbridge, West Midlands, spending 11 days in hospital.
Prosecutor Karim Khahil QC said: ‘The defendant covered his trainers with black socks before entering the house – Mr Wilkinson describes him as acting like a ninja.’
Barley was described as a ‘compulsive liar’ by his own sister and the former foster carer, and a ‘manipulator’ by professionals who came into contact with him.
Like the Wilkinsons, they were fed lies about his background and family. Mrs Wilkinson, a former champion ballroom dancer, took Barley under her wing after encountering him sleeping in a cardboard box outside her local Tesco.
He began attending a drug and alcohol rehabilitation unit in Lye, West Midlands, where she volunteered. Mrs Wilkinson organised a bed in a hostel and began inviting him around for meals.
Her widower said of one dinner: ‘I just tried to get a feeling of what he felt and what he wanted in life. And I can remember quite vividly him saying to me, “I just need somebody to give me a chance, I need somebody to give me a lucky break”.’ Around a month later, Mr Wilkinson found work for Barley as a labourer at an engineering firm he ran in Newport, South Wales, and set him up with a flat and mobile phone, paid for out of his wages.
But within six months, Barley had gone off the rails and began taking drugs again. The company, which produced road barriers, were forced to let him go.
Barley returned to the Midlands, once visiting the Wilkinsons without telling them he had come straight from a police station where he had been charged with theft and resisting arrest.
The Wilkinsons allowed Barley to stay at their home for a fortnight until they could find him a place at a hostel. Barley began doing odd jobs for the family before he found full-time employment.
Mr Wilkinson said he last saw Barley three weeks before the attack, when he again visited the house, adding: ‘I shared a curry and a couple of beers with him.
I dropped him off back at his flat. The next time I saw him he was sticking a knife into my shoulder.’
By then, Barley had been sacked after again turning to drugs.
He will be sentenced at the court this morning.
Police remain baffled by his motivations for attacking the family.
But Mr Wilkinson believes Barley, who has 21 convictions, the first aged 12, ‘decided that because his life was going bad ways he was going to take it out on the people that had cared and looked after him’.
Incredibly, he and his daughter have returned to the family home.
‘A liar and a manipulator’ ‘A knife in my shoulder’