STRANGE DEATHS
UNUSUAL WAYS OF SHUFFLING OFF THIS MORTAL COIL
Deborah Roberts, 47, was strangled to death after two dogs pulled on their leads which she was wearing around her neck as she walked them, an inquest heard. She had been walking two Staffordshire bull terriers in Wrexham when, it is believed, she may have stumbled due to her Huntington’s disease, an inherited, degenerative condition, which causes mobility deterioration. It is possible that the dogs may have been trying to get her to stand up again after a fall by pulling on the leads. Ms Roberts’s son Robert told the court that the two dogs, Tyson and Ruby, were “loving and caring pets. They are beautiful dogs. If you met them now they’d just jump up and lick you. All they were doing is trying to help my mum when she fell.” Ms Roberts had been walking the dogs with her niece, who raised the alarm. A witness who arrived at the scene to help described how the two dogs were whimpering, adding that he could see Ms Roberts was unconscious. The death was ruled accidental, with the cause of death recorded as asphyxiation by strangulation. BBC News, 3 Dec 2020.
A woman fell 30ft (9m) to her death from a road bridge spanning the A21 near Tonbridge, Kent, after escaping her burning car. Azra Kemal, 24, suffered fatal injuries when she plunged through a gap between two sides of the dual carriageway. An inquest heard the road was “pitch dark” with no street lights at the time of her fall. A friend, Omar Allen, who had been in the Ford Focus with Ms Kemal, described how the pair had been visiting his mother in East Sussex, but had left after an argument over a broken lamp.
He said the car, which had caught fire on their journey back to London, was “hissing like it was going to blow up” before it “went up quite quickly in flames”. They tried to flag down oncoming cars for help, he said, before Ms Kemal began to make her way back across the road towards the central reservation. “That’s when I heard her fall. The scream went on for so long and it was far down.” Paramedics were called, but despite their efforts she was pronounced dead at the scene from multiple severe injuries.
The inquest also heard how a police officer had encountered Ms Kemal earlier that evening, pulled over at the side of the A27 in East Sussex. The officer described her as “quite emotional” and said she “looked like she had been crying.” He recalled that she had “stumbled” as she got out of the car, before getting back in and driving away at speed. BBC News, 12 Nov 2020.
A court was told that a man who killed and dismembered Graham Snell, 71, in a bid to steal his money, dumped his victim’s remains in a badger sett. Derby Crown Court heard how defendant Daniel Walsh, 30, had left Mr Snell’s body parts in various locations around Chesterfield. On the last day he was seen alive, 19 June 2019, Mr Snell told police that Walsh had been stealing from his bank account, saying he had “a problem with a man who comes and stays at my house without being invited.” The next morning, officers called at Mr Snell’s home but by this time he was lying dead inside the house, while Walsh, also inside, refused to answer the door. On the following day, Walsh bought 10 rubble sacks and two large saws, and four days afterwards loaded two or three large black bags containing “many parts of Mr Snell’s body” into a taxi, travelling to the location of a badger sett where he “buried or pushed” the body parts into the sett. Three days later, he once again travelled by taxi to dump parts of Mr Snell’s torso in communal bins at a block of flats. They were discovered on 2 July, with the head and arms eventually being found in woods a short distance away in February 2020. The jury was also told Mr Walsh had previous convictions for stealing £5,000 from Mr Snell in 2009 and for assaulting him in 2014. Walsh was found guilty of murder and given a life sentence. BBC News, 24 Nov; derbytelegraph.co.uk, 29 Nov 2020.
A 63-year- old man in Russia was charged with murder after he beat a friend to death with a crowbar for saying that he played the accordion badly. The murderer finished off his 66-year- old victim by striking him on the head with a sledgehammer, dismembering him and disposing of the body parts in rubbish bins. The attack took place in a village near the city of Cheboksaray, 350 miles (563km) east of Moscow, after the two men had engaged in a drinking bout. State investigators said that after killing his friend, the murderer took some valerian, a herbal sleeping aid, and lay down for a nap. Times, 2 Nov 2016.