Bobbi-Anne’s savage killer jailed for at least 31 years
AMUSICIAN obsessed with US serial killer Ted Bundy has been jailed for life after acting out his warped fantasies by brutally murdering a teenage girl, a court heard.
Cody Ackland, 24, who was a guitarist with Plymouth indie band Rakuda, was leading a double life and had a secret morbid fascination with serial killers – particularly Bundy, who murdered at least 20 women in the 1970s.
The car valet was unknown to the police when he bludgeoned 18-yearold Bobbi-Anne McLeod with a claw hammer after kidnapping her from a Plymouth bus stop and taking her onto Dartmoor.
Plymouth Crown Court heard Ackland first attacked Bobbi-Anne as she waited for a bus in the city’s Leigham district in November last year.
He loaded the semi-conscious teenager into the footwell of his Ford Fiesta and drove her 20 miles to the Bellever Forest in the National Park where, like Bundy, he killed her with a hammer.
Ackland burnt her handbag and loaded her bloodied body into his boot and drove 30 miles back towards Plymouth to Bovisand where he stripped her naked and left her in undergrowth.
He later threw away her clothes in an allotment before spending the next 48 hours socialising with friends.
Three days later, Ackland turned himself in and confessed, telling detectives where he had dumped her body.
At a previous hearing, Ackland, of Radcliffe Close, Southway, Plymouth pleaded guilty to murder.
Yesterday, he was handed a life sentence and ordered to spend at least 31 years in prison.
In the days and weeks leading up to the student’s death, the obsessive searched the internet for information about serial killers’ crimes.
He kept over 3,000 grisly images on his phone, depicting dismembered or dead bodies, post-mortem examinations and murder scenes, the court heard.
Judge Robert Linford told Ackland: “On November 20 last year you subjected Bobbi-Anne McLeod to a prolonged, savage and merciless attack.”
He continued: “She was a young, popular and much-loved person, you caused outrage and fear in this part of the country and with good reason, it was utterly motiveless.”
Judge Lindford told Ackland that he would remain indefinitely a “highly dangerous person”, adding: “There is a strong possibility you may never be released from prison.”
Ackland looked at the judge throughout his remarks and nodded as his sentence was passed.
As he left the dock, Miss McLeod’s brother Lee shouted: “You’re a dead man.”
Miss McLeod’s mother Donna wept throughout the hearing.
Ackland searched online for remote locations on Dartmoor and for hammers, crowbars and cutting tools in the days before the murder.
At 5.45pm on November 20, Miss McLeod left her home in Leigham to meet her boyfriend and walked to the nearby bus stop on Bampton Road, where she was last seen alive at 6.15pm.
By 7.15pm, the teenager’s family were starting to worry and a member of the public found her abandoned mobile phone and Apple AirPod case in the bus stop.
The teenager’s boyfriend contacted her family at 9pm asking where she was, and they immediately went out looking for her and appealing on social media.
Devon and Cornwall Police launched a missing person inquiry.
The next day Ackland threw the hammer into the River Tamar and a carrier bag containing his and her bloodstained clothing into nearby allotments.
Later, he carried on as normal going for pizza with a friend, attended band practice, got a takeaway and drank into the early hours at a pub lock-in.
Friends recall him being “happier than usual”. On the Monday, Ackland went to the cinema to watch Dune.
On Tuesday at lunchtime, he left work to walk to a police station to confess to murdering Miss McLeod.
He asked for a map and directed
detectives to Bovisand – where police found her body hours later.
Forensic evidence and phone data corroborated Ackland’s story, the court heard.
Crime scene investigators located the clothes at the allotments and his blood-stained trainers were found in his wardrobe. Miss McLeod’s blood was found in and around his car.
Rakuda, who released their first EP in August last year, announced in November they would disband “with immediate effect”, but weeks later said they would be taking a “short hiatus from the music scene” with a view to reforming in the spring of 2022.
In a victim impact statement, Miss McLeod’s family said: “Our lives have changed forever. We have not been able to say goodbye to BobbiAnne and we can only imagine the things he did to her – the thoughts are continually going around in our minds.
“Why Bobbi-Anne? Why make her suffer? To know her final hours were spent being tortured destroys us inside.”
Ackland told a psychiatrist that he had been feeling low on the day of the murder, but afterwards he had “not felt the same feelings of depression and resentment as before”.
The psychiatrist remarked it was as if “this violent act has somehow rid him of these feelings”, and warned this risk was unlikely to go away.
Ackland’s barrister Ray Tully QC recounted Ackland’s struggles with ADHD, depression, dyslexia and anxiety growing up, and said that he was overwhelmed with feelings of self-loathing.
Mr Tully said his client’s obsession with images of murder victims had to be viewed through the “prism” of his mental health struggles.
“Psychiatrists characterise it as a kind of self-harm, someone who has developed an addiction to seeking out material, going back to it again and again,” he said. “[Ackland] describes it as self-medicating, if he can shock himself he might shock himself out of what he felt he had become capable of doing.”
Mr Tully said although Ackland had searched online for remote locations on Dartmoor and for hammers, crowbars and cutting tools in the days before the murder, the attack on Ms McLeod was not premeditated.