Killer in sinister threat to victims’ families as he is given life in jail
A BULLYING ‘monster’ who killed two girlfriends five years apart yesterday issued a sinister threat to their families as he was jailed for life.
As murderer Robert Trigg, 52, arrived in handcuffs at court to be sentenced, he was asked what he had to say to the relatives of his victims, Scot Caroline Devlin and Susan Nicholson, and replied: ‘They should be in here, not me. Isaiah 50 verse 11.’
The biblical quote warns those who ‘light fires and provide yourselves with flaming torches...will lie down in torment’.
Unemployed chef Trigg killed mother-offour Miss Devlin, 35, from Auchinleck, Ayrshire, in 2006 with a blow to the back of the head. Five years later he suffocated Miss Nicholson. On both occasions Sussex Police believed his claims that he simply woke up to find them dead beside him.
At Lewes Crown Court, Judge Ingrid Simler jailed Trigg for life with a minimum of 25 years after he was convicted of the manslaughter of Miss Devlin and murder of Miss Nicholson.
Fifteen stone alcoholic Trigg, from Worthing in West Sussex, failed to spark police suspicions despite a long record of drunken violence against his girlfriends.
He did not react as he was handed the sentence, which could see him die behind bars.
Judge Simler told Trigg: ‘You are responsible for the senseless and brutal deaths of two women. The grief and sadness of these two families will never leave them.’
It was only thanks to the determination of Miss Nicholson’s parents Peter and Elizabeth Skelton, both in their 80s, that Trigg was convicted.
He claimed he accidentally smothered eight stone Miss Nicholson, a former executive at the Queen’s bank Coutts, by rolling on her as they slept on a sofa.
Mr Skelton spent £10,000 hiring a barrister and pathologist to prove murder had gone unpunished.
Outside court he said: ‘We’re very angry we had to take matters into our own hands. The police should have done this. We asked for help but nobody helped us.’
The youngest of Miss Devlin’s four children, Brandyn McKenna, who was nine when her mother was killed, was also at court. The children had been about to take her breakfast in bed when Trigg left them to find her dead on Mother’s Day.
Miss McKenna said: ‘After 11 years we deserve justice for our mother. She was a lovely natured lady who was taken far too soon by the monster that was Trigg.’