I want to ask my brother Rikki’s killer what on earth he was thinking at just 13 years old to murder a little boy of six
Rikki Neave sister tells of torment
EXCLUSIVE
BY PATRICK HILL and
RIKKI Neave’s heartbroken sister wants to face his killer in prison and ask him: “Why did you kill my brother?”
Rochelle Neave is relieved that twisted sexual fantasist James Watson has finally been brought to justice after 28 years.
But she remains tormented by what drove him to kill Rikki, who was aged just six.
Rochelle, 30, said: “I don’t know why he did it and that’s what I want to know. I haven’t got closure.
“What on earth was he thinking, at 13 years old, to murder my brother? I want to speak to him and ask him to give me answers. But I don’t think I’m ever going to get them.”
Rochelle was two when he died but she remembers her “cheeky, loving” brother. Watson, then 13, lured Rikki into woods in Peterborough, Cambs, strangled him with his anorak and posed his naked body in a star shape.
He was finally arrested in April 2016, after serving 18 months for indecently assaulting a sleeping young man. Police had found his DNA on tape taken from Rikki’s clothing. But in 2018 prosecutors decided to drop the case because of “insufficient evidence”.
PREDATOR
It was only Rochelle successfully challenging that decision that led to Watson finally being put on trial and found guilty of murder last week. She attended most of the 11-week case at the Old Bailey and was left disgusted by his callous behaviour in the dock.
She said: “It was very hard to sit in that courtroom and listen to the evidence. I cried quite a few times, and it made me angry as well.
“He was smug. He was cocky. It was just like ‘The James Watson Show’.
“I found it totally insulting to my family. He rolled his eyes at us and he was laughing at us through the dock window.
“The thing that really got me is that he tried to cry in the box when he was giving his testimony, and it was the most pathetic attempt to cry I’ve ever seen in my life.
“He wiped his eye one time, wiped his nose, and then carried on.
“The answers he gave were totally contradicting.”
This month a jury convicted Watson, now 41, by a majority 10-2 verdict after 36 hours and 31 minutes of deliberation.
Detectives, who believe his motive was sexual gratification, have called him a “dangerous predator, fantasist and manipulator”. He will be sentenced on May 9 but the judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, has said his tariff “will be determined largely by the age
he was at the time of the offence”. The killer was taken into care as youngster after accusing his dad of assault.
The court heard that, after Rikki’s killing, he used a school photocopier to make 30 copies of the front page of the Peterborough Evening Telegraph
SISTER OF MURDERED RIKKI which featured the case. His ex-girlfriend told the jury he strangled her during sex and used a stocking as a ligature in a terrifying attack on a member of staff at a children’s home in the 1990s.
However, Watson was never arrested at the time of the 1994 murder. That was despite a witness placing him with Rikki on the day and a complaint to police that he had sexually assaulted a five-year-old boy 18 months earlier.
Instead, police decided Rikki and Rochelle’s mum Ruth had killed him.
She was cleared of murder in 1996, but jailed for seven years after admitting
child cruelty to him and two of his three sisters.
Rochelle, who was adopted by a family in Leicester and never refers to Ruth as ‘mum’, said: “Growing up I was always told that she did it.
“Social services said she’d been acquitted so there was nothing that could be done, which I think triggered something in my brain as a child.
“I’d think, ‘That’s my brother – why aren’t you doing anything about it? Why? I want to know why?’.
“I was always upset. I grew up as a very angry child because of it. I just wanted justice for my brother.”
Watson was smug and cocky in court…he cried fake tears and was laughing at us
ROCHELLE NEAVE