Former prison warder ‘killed by her jail lover after affair with boy of 15’
The biggest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Europe was a haven of tranquillity and calm – until a shooting range opened up next door. But now the monks and nuns have had enough... and are ready to fight back
a FORMER prison officer was battered to death by a cage fighter she had an affair with in jail, a court heard.
Paul Robson, 50, allegedly kicked and stamped on Caroline Kayll, leaving the 47-year-old with multiple head fractures and unsurvivable brain damage.
Robson had discovered that Mrs Kayll, whom he had split up with weeks earlier, had begun a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy, Newcastle Crown Court was told.
He also tried to murder the boy at Mrs Kayll’s home with scissors, a kitchen knife and a meat cleaver, the jury heard.
Robson, a martial arts enthusiast and cage-fighting coach, is said to have calmly told a neighbour he had ‘done something to Caroline’ who was in a ‘bad way’, before driving off from the scene.
The court heard that Robson began a clandestine relationship with Mrs Kayll when he was serving a jail sentence at HMP Northumberland and she worked there as a prison education officer.
Prosecutor Nicholas Lumley QC said she was married to prison manager Ian Kayll, who also worked at the jail, but they split in 2018 without him finding out about her behind-bars affair. When Robson had served his sentence he resumed his relationship with Mrs Kayll, moving in with her in august 2019. But in September last year she was ‘devastated’ when he dumped her, the court was told.
Meanwhile, Mrs Kayll had formed a ‘close bond’ with the 15-year-old and at some stage they started an illegal sexual relationship, said Mr Lumley.
Robson found out and within weeks of their split he allegedly began blackmailing her.
In the days before the murder Mrs Kayll transferred £29,000 to Robson – using savings and a £10,500 loan, the jury heard.
On November 11 last year, he drove to her home in Linton, Northumberland, to carry out the attack, said Mr Lumley.
Robson was captured on a neighbour’s CCTV ‘prowling and snooping’ around Mrs Kayll’s house. He got inside and over the next 20 minutes ‘viciously’ battered her before going upstairs to attack the teenager, the court heard.
Mrs Kayll was heard by neighbours shouting ‘get out’ before being overpowered. She suffered more than 50 injuries over her body. Robson even cut her long blonde hair off as she lay lifeless on the floor, the court heard.
The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, suffered 45 injuries from repeated stabbings and was squirted in the face with ammonia that Robson had brought with him, the jury was told.
Mr Lumley said ‘vindictive’ Robson accessed Mrs Kayll’s social media and email accounts as she was on life support to send messages to friends, colleagues and her ex-husband revealing her relationship with the boy.
Robson was tracked down and arrested days later. The court heard he claims he was talking to Mrs Kayll when the teen hit him on the head before trying to strangle him. He says the boy then attacked his lover and used scissors and a knife to attack him again.
The teenager told police in a video played in court that he heard ‘banging’ as he sat in the bedroom using his phone and smoking a cigarette. Robson, whom he didn’t know, came in with scissors and pinned him down on the bed.
‘I was face down on the bed, he was holding me down with one hand and stabbing me with the other,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get him off.
‘He gets up and said “wait there, don’t move or I will kill you” and he comes back with a bigger blade.’
The boy said Robson attacked him again using a 7in kitchen knife then ordered him downstairs where he struck him twice on the head with a meat cleaver. ‘I’m going dizzy...and lean against the wall,’ he recalled.
Robson then allegedly squirted ammonia on both victims before going to fetch next door neighbour Barbara Lee.
Mrs Lee said she told Robson to leave before calling 999 and starting to give Mrs Kayll CPR.
Robson took both victims’ mobile phones and left in a van.
The next day he used Mrs Kayll’s card to take £500 cash from her account and sent £4,000 from his own account to four people to ‘keep’ for him, the jury heard.
after his arrest he gave a prepared statement to police and said: ‘I never intended to kill anyone. I cannot believe Caroline is dead. The whole thing is like a nightmare.’
Robson, of Wallsend, North Tyneside, denies murder, attempted murder and blackmail.
The trial continues.
‘Don’t move or I’ll kill you’
AS A watery sun rises over Eskdalemuir, the golden roof of the Kagyu Samye Ling monastery seems to shimmer in the morning light. Inside the temple, Buddhist monks and nuns are assembling for their first prayer session of the day. Outside, birds sing in the trees, while Tibetan prayer flags flutter in the breeze. All is tranquil. Until the shooting starts.
‘People were saying there had been machine gun firing going on around here and at first I thought, “Come on, you’re exaggerating”,’ says Ani Lhamo, a Buddhist nun who has been a resident of Samye Ling, the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Europe, for 32 years.
‘But they weren’t. It was the US Air Force. Who’d imagine they would come to a place like Eskdalemuir?’
Who indeed? And yet in recent weeks, locals have heard shooting coming from nearby Clerkhill, around a mile from the Dumfriesshire monastery. For months, most recently for several days in February, the site has been used by the US Air Force Special Operations command for training exercises.
‘The sound of the gunfire was staggering in its extremity,’ said one local resident, who heard shots fired on the morning of February 17 and reported the incident to police.
‘It was alarming. It sounded like a pneumatic jackhammer pounding continuously on metal panels.’
Such has been the outcry that just this week the US Air Force said it was suspending all training events in the area, and ‘regretted’ the disturbance it had caused.
But it seems this may be the thin end of an incredibly noisy wedge.
Planning applications have been lodged with Dumfries & Galloway Council for two shooting ranges in Eskdalemuir within earshot of the Samye Ling monastery.
One, at Over Cassock, is a firing range, while the other, at Clerkhill, is for a 2km (1.2mile), high-velocity shooting range on land operated by Eskdalemuir Forestry, which is in turn owned, curiously, by an Austrian timber company, Kronospan.
The range, run by a firm called Gardners Guns, has been operating since last June, with retrospective planning permission now being sought by the landowner for the change in land use to accommodate the 2km target range and a cabin. There has, so far, been no public consultation.
If planning is approved, the world long-distance shooting competition is due to be held here, with competitors expected, according to correspondence with Dumfries and Galloway Council, ‘from European and USA military and law enforcement’.
Can any of this really be good karma?
‘People come here for the peace,’ says Lhamo. ‘We have a group of veterans who come here and they’ve said that if this is going on they won’t be coming again.
‘A lot of people feel very strongly about it. They value what they have experienced here. It helps people.
‘Not everyone who comes to Samye Ling is religious. But they come because it’s a peaceful, spiritual place. If there’s a lot of firing going on round us it’s not going to have a beneficial effect.’
ESKDALEMUIR is a particularly serene corner of southern Scotland. There are only 265 souls on the electoral roll, and one resident estimates 50 per cent of them are Buddhist, or have Buddhist-leaning sympathies, having been attracted to the area by Samye Ling.
It has stood on the site since 1967 and is widely regarded as the most important Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside Tibet.
There is an Eskdalemuir community hub, which in non-Covid times hosts a café and bar and runs a range of community events, and in recent years steps have been taken to develop the area as a centre for eco-tourism, with cycle routes and a prehistoric walking trail.
As Nicholas Jennings, chairman of Eskdalemuir Community Council, points out: ‘People don’t want Eskdalemuir to become the world centre of rifle shooting. It’s a world centre of peace and harmony.’
Earlier this week, the abbot of Samye Ling himself, 77-year-old Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche penned an impassioned open letter asking those involved to reconsider.
HE wrote: ‘We have always tried to be good Buddhists and especially to be good neighbours to the forestry company who owns most of the land in our area.
‘Now I hear US forces will be training on a long-range, high-velocity firing range within two kilometres of Samye Ling on forestry land.
‘Thousands of people come to Samye Ling for courses and to meditate. They all feel strongly opposed to this plan. I have many friends from around the world who are determined to raise their voices in opposition to it. I humbly request the forestry company to please reconsider this plan.’
In a departure from its usual offerings of mindfulness courses and silent retreats, the monastery has posted appeals on social media to encourage devotees to write letters to Dumfries and Galloway Council’s planning department objecting to the ranges, before yesterday’s closing date.
The abbot also pointed out that logging trucks had been travelling on local roads day and night and, at times, the clatter was so loud the monastery almost shook with the noise, yet they had never complained. But even Buddhist monks have their breaking point.
‘The abbot is an elderly gentleman,’ Lhamo says. ‘He feeds the birds and looks at them and notices the effects gunshots have on their behaviour. He feels for them.
‘He feels strongly that it would be better for everybody if the firing ranges could be farther away.’
Many within the local community – and indeed thousands from
farther afield – agree. A petition on Change.org calling for public consultation on the plans has almost 20,000 signatures.
‘The monastery is not a place for war games,’ writes one signatory.
‘One of the things that really is disturbing is that when you look at what Gardners Guns is offering. It’s a strange mixture of target shooting and military games but with live weapons,’ says Jennings.
Indeed, an advert on Gardners Guns’ Facebook page promises an event in September of this year called Send it Series Dynamic. It ‘offers an unrivalled-in-the-UK opportunity to experience real-life sniper scenarios’, the post says.
Amid the concerns, those running the range issued a robust response.
George Birrell, forestry director at Kronospan, who oversees the Clerkhill site, said in a statement: ‘Farming is a difficult business in which to thrive, and as such we have sought other ways to generate income through diversification. The proposal for a training rifle range on the farm is part of that process of diversification.
‘The design of the range is to the highest specifications for safety and has all the relevant certification for approval for use as a rifle range. Input into the design of the range has also been sought from several national organisations, such as Police Scotland.
‘The range site is sited well within the boundaries of the farm and lies some 1.2km from the nearest neighbouring buildings and some 2.1km from the Samye Ling Centre. The range site is completely fenced off and when in operation all accesses to the site are controlled.
‘We would be happy to carry out noise monitoring around the range when it is in operation.
‘It would be operated within normal working hours. We estimate it would generate in excess of £500,000 for the local economy.’
But Jennings says rifle ranges are very different to the ‘vision in the community of what our place should be about’. He adds: ‘People want to enjoy the peace and quiet of the countryside and have an appreciation for its unique environment. We’re very open-minded and very open to new ideas along sustainable and environmental lines.’
For its part, Samye Ling is surprised things have gone so far.
‘In general we’ve had a reasonable relationship with Kronospan,’ says Lhamo of the Austrian timber firm that ultimately owns the site.
‘They had lunch here once. There was that level of harmony. I don’t know if they feel that way now.’
That Samye Ling exists at all is, perhaps, testimony to that community open-mindedness.
YET it is worth noting that when the monastery was established in 1967 by two Tibetan monks, Chogyam Trungpa and Akong Rinpoche, the current abbot’s brother, some locals believed devil-worshippers had landed in Eskdalemuir.
That they were then followed by a trail of ‘smelly hippies’, including Leonard Cohen, Sir Billy Connolly and David Bowie, who inquired about becoming a monk, did little to enhance its reputation.
Lama Yeshe Losha Rinpoche himself arrived at Samye Ling in its early days after growing up in a tiny village in Eastern Tibet.
He entered a Buddhist monastery as a child and was one of 300 Tibetans who fled the country when it was invaded by the Chinese, escaping over the Himalayas. Only 13, including the abbot and his brother, made it to the border with India, before making their way to the UK.
‘Now I am an old man of 77 and I still live at Samye Ling, which has been my home for most of my life. The view from my window is of green rolling hills, as it was when I was a child, but now I live near Lockerbie and the Tibet of my childhood is no more,’ he wrote in his autobiography, From a Mountain in Tibet: A Monk’s Journey, released last summer.
TODAY, Samye Ling is a much-loved cornerstone of the community and a learning and teaching centre with a global reputation. Pre-pandemic it welcomed around 10,000 visitors a year.
Dominating its skyline is the 64ft victory stupa for world peace, a white and gold tower adorned with prayer flags and full of sacred objects. It was built in 2000 to mark the millennium and dedicated to healing the environment.
The monastery also runs courses with Aberdeen University’s mindfulness MSc programme.
‘We value this wonderful place and the local people,’ says Lhamo. ‘We don’t want to cause trouble. What we’re asking for is for the firing range to be in a different place. All we can do is express our wish.’
And, one presumes, pray for some good karma.