Lucy killer’s violent past revealed as he gets life
THE shocking extent of the authorities’ failure to save schoolgirl Lucy McHugh was exposed yesterday.
As her killer’s list of convictions was read out, a judge asked how social services could have missed them all.
Lucy, 13, was ‘executed’ by her family’s lodger, Stephen Nicholson, 25, who lured her into woods in Hampshire in July last year to stop her exposing the sexual abuse he had been inflicting on her for a year. He stabbed the teenager 27 times.
Yet social services had twice concluded the vulnerable schoolgirl’s ‘relationship’ with a troubled man twice her age was nothing to worry about.
Yesterday the alarming extent of this failure was laid bare as, for the first time, Nicholson’s long history of violence and obsession with knives was revealed.
Winchester Crown Court was told he had been offending since he was 14, when he was living in a children’s home. High on amphetamines, he took two members of staff hostage at knifepoint.
Nicholson was jailed for two years, but while serving his sentence in a youth detention centre, he and two fellow inmates barricaded themselves in a canteen. Prosecutor William Mousley QC said: ‘As the guards tried to regain control, he armed himself with sharp knives and tried to stab a prison guard.’
Southampton City Council’s social services was twice alerted that Lucy had a ‘boyfriend’ ten years older than her but took no action. Mrs Justice May said: ‘The obvious question is how social services could have arrived at that conclusion – not once but twice – given what Lucy had told friends and what Nicholson has been convicted of.’
Sentencing the tattoo artist to life in prison with a minimum of 33 years, the judge said: ‘This was a pitiless attack on a child following months of sexual exploitation.’