Stop it daddy!
Eight-year-old girl’s cry ‘as father with knife dragged her back inside house to her death’ following row with mother
A CHILD cried for her mother and screamed ‘Stop it daddy!’ before she was stabbed to death by him, a jury heard yesterday.
Mylee Billingham’s mother sobbed in court as she described watching her ex-partner drag their eightyear-old daughter into his home by her coat hood.
In a desperate 999 call Tracey Taundry, who had arrived to collect Mylee, pleaded with the police to hurry to the scene, shouting: ‘He’s got my baby inside, he’s making her scream.’ Mylee was stabbed ‘right through’ her chest and died in hospital, jurors were told.
They heard earlier that William Billingham had been struggling to deal with bisexual Miss Taundry’s three-month-old relationship with another woman when he carried out the ‘swift, deliberate, clinical and brutal’ attack in January. Miss Taundry, who is mother to three of Billingham’s six children, told jurors she had agreed that Mylee could have a sleepover at Billingham’s bungalow in Brownhills, West Midlands.
Billingham, 55, went on to post a picture on Facebook of the child eating pizza in bed there that evening.
But soon after it was taken, Mylee complained of a sore throat and asked for her mother to collect her.
Miss Taundry, 34, was dropped off near the property by her girlfriend and was met by Billingham and then Mylee at the door.
But she told jurors that as she walked away from the bungalow to go home with her daughter, she heard a ‘tink’ sound – and turned around to see Billingham picking up a knife from the doorstep.
Giving evidence from behind a screen, Miss Taundry said Billing- ham then said: ‘It’s not f ****** happening’.
When she asked him what he meant Billingham, who was known as Bill, ‘came towards me and had the knife to my neck’. She added: ‘He said, “I’m going to kill you”.
‘Mylee was on my left side. I turned to her and pushed her, to move her. I started running back away from the house and slipped.
‘Mylee was standing on a drain by the front door. She was crying. She was shouting “Mummy! Stop it daddy, mummy!”
‘He went towards her and grabbed her by the hood. He dragged her back in the door.’
Miss Taundry said her daughter was still shouting for her as the door slammed shut. In a transcript of the 999 call made by Miss Taundry outside the house, which was read to the court, she tells an operator: ‘Please hurry up. He has dragged my baby inside the house, he’s got my baby inside.
‘He is making her scream. He has got a big knife and is going to stab her.’
Miss Taundry went on to tell the operator she thought Billingham had been drinking, before adding: ‘I am in a new relationship and this is what it’s about.’
Prosecutor Karim Khalil, QC, said Billingham told police he felt ‘as if he had lost his other children to the internet and that he didn’t want to lose Mylee the same way’.
But he added: ‘The killing is most likely explained by the jealousy [he] felt towards Tracey Taundry and her new partner.’
Billingham denies murder and making a threat to kill. The trial at Birmingham Crown Court continues.
‘He is making her scream’