Coronation Street killer
Boy of 14 obsessed with TV soap murder plot battered his mother to death with hammer
A FORMER prep school pupil obsessed with horror movies and a Coronation Street murder plot was jailed for life yesterday after battering his mother to death with a hammer.
Daniel Bartlam was just 14 when he hit mother Jacqueline, 47, seven times with a claw hammer at their detached cul-de-sac home.
He then padded her body with paper, doused it in petrol and set fire to it in a bid to destroy evidence and commit the ‘perfect murder’. Mrs Bartlam had to be identified using dental records.
A court heard the teenager rescued his younger brother and the family pet before fleeing from the burning house, telling police that Mrs Bartlam, a Land Registry worker, had been killed by an intruder.
But Bartlam was charged with murder after police discovered video footage on his computer of Coronation Street’s killer character, John Stape.
Last night ITV was forced to defend the soap’s ‘pre-watershed’ storylines, which have become increasingly lurid in the past
‘Senseless
killing’
couple of years. Nottingham Crown Court heard Bartlam was ‘obsessed’ with Stape – who battered a woman with a hammer before leaving her body in the wreckage of a tram crash to cover up his crime – and stored files relating to the plot on his computer.
When they examined the rest of the hard drive they discovered he had searched for webpages about ‘people who get away with murder in shows’.
He posted violent scenes from television soap Eastenders on Youtube and had a fixation with crime drama Trial and Retribution.
He also penned a soap operastyle plot in which he fantasised about a character called Daniel Bartlam killing ‘Jackie’, his mother.
A source close to the case told the Daily Mail: ‘ He comes across as being very mature but there is a distinct lack of emotion. If he was an adult he could be considered a psychopath.’
The product of a broken home, Bartlam had been obsessed with horror films since the age of eight and watched the gruesome Saw 3D movie hours before the murder.
He was convicted of his mother’s murder in February following a two-week trial, but it was only after his sentencing yesterday that Mr Justice Flaux lifted reporting restric- tions which prevented him from being named.
Sentencing Bartlam to life with a minimum of 16 years for the ‘ senseless and grotesque killing’, the judge said the murder involved a high degree of planning, and Bartlam remained ‘extremely dangerous’.
During his trial, the jury were told he was a ‘young man who immersed himself in a fantasy world; fantasy words he wrote, television drama, films he accessed by the internet and other internet sites’.
Prosecutor Sean Smith added: ‘The boundaries between real life and fiction became very, very tragically blurred.’
Bartlam, who is now 15, initially told police he had a good relationship with his mother.
On the night of the murder he claimed to have been confronted by a masked intruder at the property in Redhill, Nottingham, when he got up to use the toilet. He said the man threw a hammer at him before fleeing and that he then found his mother’s body on the floor of her burning bedroom. He said he panicked and fled with his brother and their dog.
Bartlam was charged two days after the killing. In an outburst at the secure unit he was remanded to soon after, he threatened to ‘kill’ a fellow patient, ‘like I killed my mum’.
He denied murder, offering to admit manslaughter on the basis that he snapped after being branded a ‘f****** freak’ by his mother. Prosecutors refused to accept the plea and Bartlam will begin his sentence in a young offenders’ institution. Bartlam’s father Adrian, a successful businessman, separated from his mother in 2005, shortly after the birth of their other child, a boy who is now six.
Until then, Bartlam had attended Greenholme, a Nottingham preparatory school which closed last year, and Dagfa, a private boys’ school.
But financial pressures meant that following his parents’ separation, Bartlam was sent to a Roman Catholic state school, where he failed to settle.
In 2010, he was referred to a school counsellor after telling pupils his tie, which he named ‘Fred’, was trying to hurt him. But just six weeks before the killing, mental health assessors concluded that Bartlam found him to be of little or no risk to himself or others.
A Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust spokesman said: ‘Due to patient confidentiality we are unable to provide any further comment.’
Mrs Bartlam’s parents, who asked not to be named, said in a statement: ‘There are no winners here because not only have we lost Jacqui, but we have lost Daniel too.’
Coronation Street has been nicknamed ‘the most violent place in Britain’, with ten characters killed off in the past two years. A tram disaster in December 2010 took the lives of four characters, while rapist Frank Foster was murdered last month.
An ITV spokesman said the channel took ‘careful steps to ensure that pre-watershed drama was appropriate for a family audience’.