Tributes to parents and daughter, 4, killed in fire
TRIBUTES have been paid to a couple who died with their four-year-old daughter in a fire at their home.
Flowers have been laid outside the house in Exeter where Kaylie Rudge, 28, her 29-year-old husband Daniel and their little girl Lilly lost their lives.
Three other children – two boys, aged four and nine, and a seven-year-old girl – remain in hospital.
‘Words cannot describe how we feel,’ said Mr Rudge’s sister Mandy, 31, at her parents’ home in Exeter.
‘We were talking with them only the other day and now they are gone.
‘Kaylie was the most beautiful person in the world and Daniel has the biggest heart in the world. They would do anything for anyone.’
Ms Rudge added the family had not been given any indication as to the cause of the blaze.
Ch Supt Daniel Evans, of Devon and Cornwall Police, said there was no evidence the fire was started deliberately.
‘We are working closely with specialist scene investigators to help us understand how this tragic incident could have occurred,’ he said.
Keen motorcyclist Mr Rudge was a member of the Demons Motorcycle Club of Devon.
He and his wife, a full-time mum, had been married for five years.
Close family friend Lauren England said: ‘We are absolutely devastated.’
A GoFundMe page ‘for Dan and family’ to help the surviving children has been set up by Natalie Anderson, a member of the bike club.
A JEALOUS boyfriend killed his fiancée on the night they got engaged because she had been exchanging affectionate texts with another lover.
Mark Brandford beat Kayleigh Dunning with a crowbar and stabbed her as she lay naked in bed, after he discovered that she had been sending messages that evening to Dean Drooney.
The attack by the road sweeper, 49, was so ‘brutal and ferocious’ his victim suffered a crushed skull, a jury heard.
He also severed the main artery in the 32-year-old’s neck by raining blow after blow on her head.
A court heard cleaner Ms Dunning was told ‘Night noodle, wuv you’ by Mr Drooney and texted back: ‘Night, night.
Wuv you more Doodle, xxx.’ She had also accidentally called her partner by Mr Drooney’s name.
‘I was jealous. She had told me she had left him,’ Brandford, of Portsmouth, said in evidence. He went to work the next day and told colleagues of the engagement before later making a sham 999 call, saying he had found her dead. Months before the December 2019 attack, he sent intimate photos of Ms Dunning to friends and family and set up a fake Facebook account in her name to ‘control her’, Portsmouth crown court heard. He was convicted of murder and of disclosing private sexual photos with the intent to cause distress. Brandford was not in court for the verdict as he is self-isolating in jail after being in contact with someone infected with Covid. He will be sentenced on Friday.