Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Julia was amazing.. she helped women in danger
Husband’s tearful tribute as loner, 22, found guilty of PCSO murder
AFTER a twisted loner was found guilty of murdering PCSO Julia James, her heartbroken husband praised her dedication to helping vulnerable women.
Paul James fought back tears as he spoke of his “amazing” wife who was bludgeoned to death in woodland while walking her dog.
Jurors took just over an hour to convict Callum Wheeler, 22, of murdering the 53-year-old gran with a 7lb railway jack handle.
Paul said outside court: “She helped everybody, she just couldn’t do enough.”
Julia’s job involved supporting victims of domestic abuse. Her husband said: “She was amazing, I was so proud of her.
“The work she did was just amazing, to help so many other people, women who were in danger from men, bad men.”
Paul described Julia as the “funniest person I have ever met”.
He added: “I hurt so much.” He later
said they were so in love they would call each other three or four times a day.
He said: “My heart would flutter every time I’d see her and I would tell her that every day, every morning, every night.”
Paul added that every day felt like they were still on honeymoon.
And he said that “all the time, even now” he can feel “her presence with me”.
Julia’s daughter Bethan Coles called her mum’s killer a “vile excuse for a human being”.
Julia’s son Patrick Davis vowed to remember the “amazing life” his mother had and “not how it was ended by that monster”.
He added: “She was the best. She went without so we could grow up having things. There’s no words to describe how amazing she was.”
The court heard that unemployed Wheeler waited in the woods to carry
out an ambush. The killer, described by police as a “complete loner”, had planned the motiveless attack over “many days and weeks”, the court heard.
Prosecutor Alison Morgan said: “This defendant was an angry, violent, strange, highly sexualised man. There is no mental health defence available to him.
“He knew people walked dogs in those woods.
“He knew if he waited there would be a lone female when nobody else was around, when he could commit this attack.”
Julia was walking her Jack Russell near her home in Snowdown, Kent, when Wheeler attacked her with the 3ft-long metal weapon on April 27 last year. Canterbury crown court heard she had taken her usual route to a beauty spot she knew as Butterfly Corner and was on the return leg when her heart rate suddenly spiked as she ran from her attacker, data from her Apple Watch showed. She fell in a field, breaking her wrist, before she was hit on the head.
The prosecution said the blows rained down “again and again and again”.
Ms Morgan told the court Wheeler had been “touching” Julia – his DNA was found on her vest under two layers of clothes in the “area of her left breast”.
The court heard that during his time in custody Wheeler exposed himself to female officers and told a member of staff that Julia “deserved to die”.
He also said he would go back to the woods and kill again, the court was told.
Wheeler, who was last night in custody at Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, had searched for porn and the word “rape” on his computer days before the murder. The attacker, from Aylesham, Kent, had admitted killing Julia but denied murder.
No evidence was offered in his defence. He will be sentenced at a later date.