KILLER ‘COPIED CORRIE MURDER’
– Court told
A BOY of 14 studied Coronation Street killer character John Stape before killing a woman with a hammer, a court heard.
The teenager is said to have battered the middleaged victim before dousing her body in petrol and setting fire to her house.
He was “obsessed” with the story of hammer-wielding Corrie villain Stape – the character who killed a woman with a hammer and tried to cover his tracks, Nottingham Crown Court was told.
The jury also heard the teen accessed a file on a website entitled, “How To Get Away With Murder”.
The woman’s body was so badly burned that she could only be identified through her dental records.
Fantasy
Police found a montage of scenes from TV soaps on his home computer – including fire scenes and a hammer murder, the jury was told.
Prosecutor Shaun Smith QC told the court: “He was, we say, obsessed with John Stape, the Coronation Street man who killed a woman with a hammer and made it look like she had been injured in a crash.
“You will hear about 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.
“And he did that to such an extent that the prosecution say the boundaries between real life and fiction became very, very tragically blurred.”
The youth, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, admits killing the woman at her home in Notts – but denies murder on the basis he lost self-control due to particular circumstances.
Pornographic
Computer experts retrieved files and internet history from his computer that showed he had allegedly researched a number of significant to pics online.
He had written a story about murdering a woman with a hammer.
And on the youth’s computer the majority of files of websites he had accessed – from the time he got his computer to the date of the killing last year – were violent or pornographic or related specifically to murder, the court heard.
The boy also had a montage of scenes of fires from TV programmes and a televison murder involving a hammer stored on his computer.
He denies murder. The case continues.