Model’s family warned her about ex who killed her
A MIDLAND model’s family warned her to be careful around the man she met on Tinder before he killed her, a friend revealed.
Christina Rowe was just 28 when she was stabbed through the heart by her paranoid ex Charles Byrne.
Byrne, of Worcester, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, killed Christina because he thought she was a ‘reskinned male paedophile’, a court heard. He then put her body in a suitcase and weighed it down with bricks before dumping it in the River Severn.
Byrne, aged 25, was jailed for life for fatally stabbing Miss Rowe at her home in February last year.
Christina’s friend George Devereux, 31, from Worcester, said: “I warned her about him and so did her
family. It was a difficult one because we didn’t know the extent of everything. I don’t think they were together when I gave her a friendly warning to be careful around him, but they were still talking. I was concerned for her. He was behaving erratically and was quite aggressive and controlling. She came to stay with me and I later found out he would turn up at her home in the middle of the night.”
Christina tried to help troubled Byrne through a mental health crisis even after their brief relationship ended. But he became convinced Christina was an “imposter” and, even after they split, he would visit her at her home in the Tolladine area of Worcester at night.
Christina’s death continues to haunt Mr Devereux. He said: “It still keeps me up at night, thinking about it. It’s going to haunt me for a while. I saw in an article that a psychiatrist said he (Byrne) was a ‘kind man’ and the whole reason he did it was because of mental illness. I don’t believe he wanted to take her life.
“There’s a difference between doing something consciously and in your right mind and not. One way I’ve rationalised it in my head is comparing it to if someone drink drives and kills someone, they are at fault but it’s different to if they planned something before.
“That being said, mental illness or not there are certain actions that have to be punished. I think it’s good he’s in a mental hospital now and that he will be transferred to prison.”
Byrne, formerly of Waterworks Road, Worcester, denied murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility at Worcester Crown Court. He will be detained in a secure hospital after being made subject to a hybrid hospital order at Worcester Crown Court. He is currently a patient at high-security Ashworth Hospital.