Life in jail for graduate who knifed ex to death
Mum yelled ‘wake up’ at body
‘I kissed the floor and told her I loved her’
THe mother of a graduate stabbed to death by her exboyfriend screamed at her daughter to ‘wake up’ after visiting her in the morgue.
Julie Devey, 56, said ‘half of her died’ alongside 24-year- old Poppy who suffered 49 wounds in a frenzied attack as she slept.
In a heartbreaking statement, she said her family will never recover from the loss of the ‘prodigiously gifted’ mathematician.
Speaking as her killer was jailed for life, Mrs Devey sobbed as she remembered ‘stroking her hands across the floorboards’ where her daughter had taken her last breaths. ‘My baby, my daughter, my life as I know it has ended, has died – suddenly, violently and cruelly,’ she told Leeds Crown Court.
Poppy Devey Waterhouse was murdered by Joe Atkinson, 25, in an ‘unprovoked attack fuelled by raging jealousy’, the court was told. She bled to death in the hallway of the flat she shared with Atkinson after he attacked her in December. The sweethearts, who both had first-class degrees, had ended their three-year relationship in October.
Miss Devey Waterhouse was due to move out of the Leeds flat two days later when Atkinson came home drunk at 3am and picked up a kitchen knife.
Atkinson said afterwards: ‘I don’t know how many times I stabbed her. I just didn’t stop. I only stopped when it went calm and she stopped moving.’
A post-mortem examination found she had more than 100 injuries, including 23 knife wounds to her head and neck that were so savage they penetrated her skull, voice box and jugular veins.
Mrs Devey stared at the killer as she tearfully described entering her daughter’s flat after the murder. ‘Actually being in the same space where Poppy had died was shattering,’ she said. ‘I kept stroking my hands along the floorboards where she had lain bleeding and dying and screaming with no one to help her. I kissed the floor and told her that I loved her.’
The mother reduced her family and legal staff to tears as she said she kissed a lock of her daughter’s hair every morning and night. She told the court: ‘As a parent my basic duty is to keep my children safe. I didn’t keep Poppy safe. I failed and I failed and I failed. Future doesn’t exist to me. I can’t see it. All I see is a dense grey fog that continues forever, no ending and no way out.’
Mrs Devey said she is haunted by the image of her daughter’s body. ‘I went to see her in the mortuary several times,’ she said. ‘I was telling her “wake up Poppy, wake up”.’
Poppy’s father Rupert, who separated from her mother two years ago, broke down in tears as he spoke in court.
‘This is a statement of over 100 injuries and 49 knife wounds,’ he said. ‘Countless blows rained down on my daughter. Thud, slice, thump and stab. And another, and another. The man she had loved hacking at her neck, her blood splattering on the wall. Get out of my head. Get out of my head.’
Mr Waterhouse clutched a green jumper given to him as a birthday present by his daughter, which he has worn every day since her death.
Jailing Atkinson for 16 years, Mr Justice Lavender said: ‘This was clearly a frenzied and savage attack.’ Atkinson, of Leeds, was due to go on trial after initially pleading not guilty to murder, but appeared at Leeds Crown Court last Friday to plead guilty.
Prosecutor Jason Pitter said Poppy’s bright future had been ‘cruelly and selfishly extinguished’.