I went round with a knife, I stabbed them both, murder trial is told

JURORS HAVE heard a chilling recording of a former soldier telling a 999 operator after killing his neighbours: “I went round with a knife. I’ve stabbed both of them.”

Ex-commando Collin Reeves is on trial at Bristol Crown Court where he denies the murder of Jennifer Chapple, 33, and her 36-year-old teacher husband Stephen on November 21 last year.

Reeves claims he was suffering an abnormality of mental functioning at the time of the killings and has admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Jurors were played a clip of the defendant’s 999 call made minutes after he went round to the married couple’s home and attacked them with a ceremonial dagger he was given when he left the Army.

The operator at one point mistook Reeves, 35, for the injured party, asking him whether he was harmed before he told her: “I went round with a knife, I’ve stabbed both of them.”

Asked whether the couple were awake when he left, he replied: “No, I think they were sort of drifting.

“He was lying on the floor, she was lying on the sofa.”

When officers arrived at the scene, the couple’s children were still asleep upstairs at the home in Dragon Rise, Norton Fitzwarren, near Taunton, Somerset.

Reeves had been involved in a long-running dispute with the couple over designated parking on the new-build housing development.

Just 10 days before the killings, Reeves allegedly verbally abused

Mrs Chapple outside her house following an earlier exchange between the victim and Reeves’s wife Kayley Reeves.

His mother Lynn Reeves said in a filmed police interview played earlier to jurors that her son was a “closed book” who “never shared his emotions”.

The trial continues.