Chef ‘killed two girlfriends in their sleep 5 years apart’
A FORMER chef killed two of his girlfriends in their sleep, leaving one of them to be found by her children on Mother’s Day, a court heard yesterday.
Robert Trigg, 52, is accused of murdering Susan Nicholson in 2011 as they slept on the sofa together, five years after he allegedly killed another partner, Caroline Devlin, in her bed.
He managed to fool police who did not think the two deaths were suspicious, despite him joking about his first victim suffocating and saying he had rolled on top of his second while sleeping, a jury was told.
Trigg failed to call the emergency services each time and instead went out for cigarettes. Yet he was not arrested at the time. He was treated by police more as a bereaved partner than a suspect after both deaths, it was alleged.
Trigg allegedly had a history of violence towards women and alcohol abuse. Another former girlfriend, Caroline O’Toole, told police: ‘When he drinks he is a completely different person, he is like Jekyll and Hyde.’
Miss Devlin, 35, was found to have died of natural causes and an inquest ruled that 52-yearold Miss Nicholson’s death was an accident.
Lewes Crown Court heard how Miss Devlin was found dead in her bedroom by her young children after they went to ask what she would like for her Mothering Sunday breakfast on March 26, 2006.
Duncan Atkinson QC, prosecuting, said Trigg asked the children to check on their mother after making a coffee and leaving the house. He appeared ‘dazed and weird’.
When Miss Devlin’s daughter Codie went to make her breakfast, she found her mother’s body freezing cold, lying face down in the duvet at the bottom of the bed at her home in Worthing, West Sussex.
Yesterday neighbour Bridget Benger fought back tears as she recalled the mother-of-four’s eldest son knocking on her door, and telling her: ‘We can’t wake Mummy.’
Trigg told police who arrived at the scene that he heard Miss Devlin ‘make a noise as if she had broken wind and assumed she had gone to sleep’. PC Julie Cox said: ‘He said he had thought to himself, jokingly, “I hope she had not suffocated.”’
A post- mortem examination found clotted blood at the base of her brain and gave the cause of death as natural causes by an aneurysm, although there was ‘no physical finding’ to support the conclu-
‘He is like Jekyll and Hyde’
sion. But when pathologist Dr Nathaniel Cary looked at the case again after Miss Nicholson’s death, he concluded the blow may have been caused by a fist.
Trigg also had a ‘violent and volatile’ relationship with Miss Nicholson and police were called at least six times before she was found dead at her home in Worthing on April 17, 2011.
Trigg said Miss Nicholson died after he accidentally rolled onto her in his sleep while they were on a sofa, a theory considered ‘plausible’ at the time. When Dr Cary re-examined the case, he concluded that Miss Nicholson was suffocated after having her head deliberately forced into the bed.
Mr Atkinson said Trigg, whom he described as ‘possessive, controlling and jealous’, had assaulted a number of other former girlfriends
Trigg, of Worthing, denies murdering Miss Nicholson and the manslaughter of Miss Devlin. The case continues.