Murder.com (5 page)

It was in the sanctity of his lair that the pasty-faced deviant with a wolfish smile would enact his lifelong fantasy of strangling a woman to death for sexual pleasure. Against Coutts’s demented onslaught, poor Jane stood no chance. She was dragged into the bedroom, hurled down on to the bed and raped. During this ordeal, she was also strangled with a pair of tights.

The savage indignities wreaked on Jane Longhurst would continue long after her death.

Once the police had focused on Coutts as their prime suspect, it was only a short time before he was arrested. He professed to be in shock at the charges levelled at him. From the outset, he denied everything and proved to be a very stubborn interviewee. He was released but shortly afterwards rearrested, and this time the police came down a lot harder on him. They had spoken to a couple of his ex-girlfriends, who had had some very disquieting things to say about the man. He liked to tie them up and partly strangle them, for example. Some smothering during sex with Coutts was not unheard of either.

When police obtained authorisation to search the suspect’s home, they discovered, along with more DNA evidence linking him to Jane Longhurst, two home computers. Stored on these were thousands of hardcore pornographic images, the vast majority of which depicted women being brutalised: hanging, suffocation, stabbing all being inflicted on bound, or in some way helpless, women, naked and raped. Some of the women appeared to be dead: covered in blood or with cyanotic hues discolouring their faces as a result of strangulation, their eyes staring glassily into the camera.

These sickening images were discovered after a look at Coutts’s online history to trace his recent internet travels. Among the disgusting websites he visited, all of which showed extreme brutality and degradation of women, were pages devoted to rape, necrophilia, hanging and asphyxiation. It was also learned that these were among the sites viewed by Coutts the day before Jane went missing.

Given his obvious interest in violent atrocities committed against young women, the police confronted Coutts with what they had gleaned from his PC. Armed also with the physical evidence they had gathered, they tried to persuade him to at least admit some culpability for Jane’s death.

Under questioning, Coutts alternated between reeling off phrases such as ‘I really don’t want to talk about this with you’ and openly weeping. Mostly, though, the part-time salesman with the eerie stare and receding hairline just sat in silence, failing to answer any questions at all.

In the end, he did acknowledge that he had been responsible for Jane’s death but insisted that it had come about as a direct result of an accident caused during what he described as ‘a mutual fantasy’.

Jane, he said, had consented to being tied up and strangled with a pair of stockings during sex, but he had unfortunately taken it too far. The fact that the tights he used to garrotte the life out of Jane Longhurst had been so deeply embedded in her throat that they had almost disappeared seemed not to dissuade him from trotting out this ludicrous story.

The police knew they were dealing with a sado-sexual homicidal psychopath – one of the most dangerous of all killer breeds. They had recently secured CCTV video footage of
Coutts at the Big Yellow Storage Company in Brighton wheeling around a huge cardboard box. Inside this box was Jane Longhurst, naked, some 11 days after she had been murdered. Coutts, it transpired, had had to remove the decomposing body from his garden shed, where the body had originally been stored, because it had begun to smell.

He later said that he had not wanted to upset his utterly unaware girlfriend, who was expecting twins, with the foul odour of putrefying flesh. Coutts had made the gruesome pilgrimage to the storage facility to abuse the corpse on at least ten occasions. In fact, he only disposed of his victim’s body when he feared he might be caught.

His clandestine trips to his garden shed were doubtless spent engaged in similar revolting necrophiliac acts. Despite the horror of what this man had done, he displayed absolutely no remorse in the presence of the police officers who questioned him. They resolved that Coutts, once found guilty, was going to prison for a very long time.

The trial of Graham Coutts began on Monday, 14 January 2004, and emotions were running high in the Crown Court in Lewes, a few miles from Brighton; the sheer fiendishness of the alleged crimes was enough to guarantee the accused a hostile reception.

Flanked by guards, Coutts sat in the dock, quite placid for the most part, dressed in a dark suit and tie. Occasionally, he would put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses which merely served to make him look like a more scholarly version of the sexual deviant the prosecution claimed he was. Though he could easily have passed for a chartered accountant or a respectable businessman, sitting there so smartly attired, no
one was fooled – he seemed to exude an air of malevolence as his eyes swam behind the lenses of his spectacles.

The first issue the Crown dismantled was Coutts’s categorical denial that he had murdered Jane Longhurst to satisfy a macabre fascination with strangled and dead women. He claimed instead, as he had earlier to the police, that Jane had consented to ‘asphyxial’ sex during which he tied a pair of tights around her neck. He did admit storing Jane’s body in his shed and, later, a box for 35 days after her death, before setting it alight with petrol and a match.

Two of Jane’s former boyfriends were called. Lincoln Abbotts told the court that he had had a ‘normal’ sex life with her. At no point had they incorporated, or even discussed, asphyxia or strangulation in their lovemaking. And a written statement from Michael Downe confirmed the same thing. He and Jane had never spoken of bondage, or anything of that nature.

It was starting to look as though Graham Coutts had made an error of judgement when it came to Jane Longhurst’s sexual proclivities. Either that or he had fabricated this whole disparaging assault on Jane’s memory in an attempt to conceal his own loathsome perversions.

To highlight Coutts’s long-term pattern of depraved behaviours and lend additional credence to the idea of the man’s inherent lusts, the prosecution called two of the defendant’s former sexual partners to the stand. One of these women, 51-year-old Sandra Gates, ensured that the jury gained a most disturbing insight into the real Graham Coutts.

Mrs Gates drew an indelible portrait of the man she had once been intimate with. Speaking of her years with Coutts, she would reveal how he always liked to go to bed first, lying secretly in the dark, waiting for Sandra to join him. This sense of
anticipation, this thrill at being able to frighten, is almost universal in sexual psychopaths.

The American serial killer Ted Bundy, when he wasn’t raping and murdering untold numbers of women, would often sneak up on a girlfriend or jump out of bushes to scare her. He also liked to tie her up with stockings and would sometimes choke her during intercourse.

Graham Coutts was no different in his bedroom exploits. ‘Put on your white panties and stockings, babe,’ he would whisper out of the darkness. Sandra knew what was coming. She had endured this ritual before. As Graham instructed her to kneel on the floor, he slid quietly out of the bed and crept through the dark room towards her.

He would materialise like a phantom behind her, signalling his presence by suddenly stroking her neck – an area of the body he had already alluded to having an intense fetish for. ‘I’m gonna put something around your neck now, babe,’ he rasped. A pair of tights would then be wound around her throat and Coutts would begin throttling her. ‘Keep quiet now, darling,’ he would pant, clearly in ecstasy as he slowly constricted his girlfriend’s breathing.

For six long years, Sandra remained with Coutts, tolerating his twisted sex games and perverse fantasies, mainly as a means of avoiding his violent rages. It seemed her lover had quite a temper when he didn’t get his own way.

Like so many other killers of this ilk, Coutts was described by Sandra as being ‘very charming… on the surface’. Underneath the flimsy veneer, however, lay a ruthless pervert who would one day realise his morbid aspirations.

In court, Sandra described herself as being emotionally
vulnerable when she had first met Coutts, 16 years earlier, in The Wick pub in Brighton. He was a young guitarist who played in some of the local bands and he made quite an impression on the lonely, divorced mother of five. Sandra was Graham’s senior and was surprised and flattered by his attentions.

‘Graham seemed like a nice young man,’ she said, her voice shaking ever so slightly. ‘He didn’t seem remotely strange and we’d chat about music. If anything, he was shy and bashful.’ At first she rejected his advances because ‘I thought I was far too old for him’.

But Coutts knew what he wanted. He was persistent and Sandra reluctantly agreed to meet him for lunch one day. ‘He told me he earned a lot of money as a window salesman and owned his own house. I was very impressed that someone so young was so successful. I enjoyed his company. He was clever, articulate and had a very dry sense of humour – very mature for his age.’

Sandra felt particularly fragile after her husband left her. She’d met him when she was 18 and at that time knew nothing of dating. ‘Graham was very flattering and would tell me how attractive I was. I fell for it,’ she whispered almost guiltily.

Six weeks after she met Coutts, they had sex for the first time at his home in Peacehaven, a town just outside Brighton. ‘It was very normal, missionary-position sex,’ Sandra told the court. ‘There was no sign that he had this fetish for strangulation during sex. That only started a year later. He was very careful to introduce it gradually. But his sex drive was just unbelievable. He wanted sex every day and would even masturbate in front of me. I stupidly thought all young guys were like that.’

Three months into their relationship, Coutts moved in with Sandra.

‘At first we were quite happy. Graham could be great when he joined in [with our] family life…’ she said, adding, after some thought, ‘Though there was evidence of a brooding, anti-social side to him.’

She remembered, ‘Other times he was very controlling, refusing to share things and yelling at the kids.’ But it seemed that her lover’s good side outweighed the bad and, besides, Sandra was scared of being alone again.

Over time, however, she became very disturbed by her partner’s strange sexual kinks. She noted, for example, that he would become aroused whenever she was upset. ‘I was crying one night and he was cuddling me, when suddenly he announced he had an erection. That set a pattern. He would upset me to turn himself on. He also became very controlling with me and the children, telling us not to have a shower or a bath, to save money. Over time he isolated me from friends and family and made me change my appearance. He liked women to wear thick, black tights, short skirts and have short, spiky hair. The sex also got more bizarre as time went on. At first he would stroke my neck during sex, then move on to putting his hands around my neck. He used to like the lights off and for me to be silent. I was nervous but it never went as far as me passing out. I never lost consciousness but feared I would. I’m lucky he didn’t kill me. He told me asphyxiation would improve my orgasms but it did nothing for me. It seemed to please him and the longer we were together the more intimidated I became.’

Focusing hard on these difficult memories, Sandra bravely continued, telling of how Coutts would stare blankly into space during these episodes, obviously very far away in his imaginary world. If ever she requested him to stop, he would reluctantly
accede to her wishes, but only after maintaining his grip on her throat for a while longer.

Coutts, it was noted, also derived pleasure from tightening stockings and white cotton knickers around Sandra’s neck and, as always, he relished any opportunity to frighten her. This was something at which he had become quite skilled.

On one occasion, he shoved a pillow over her face during sex. Sandra panicked, struggling hard. Coutts finally relented, but that odd gaze of his remained fixed on her.

Now, struggling to retain her composure and taking occasional sips of water from the cup provided by the court usher, Sandra went on, ‘I suppose I tried to keep him happy so he wouldn’t be shouting at the kids all the time. If I refused to let him have sex, he would only persist until he got his way.’

Like so many other women who have had relationships with such predators, Sandra questioned her own motives for remaining with this man. ‘Why I stayed with him I’ll never know. I was frightened. By the end I couldn’t sleep and suffered panic attacks.’

Among Coutts’s wide-ranging sexual deviations, he was also an accomplished peeping Tom. When asked by the prosecution about his voyeuristic pursuits in the home the coupled shared, Sandra became distraught. ‘He used to peep at my girls when they were getting undressed,’ she explained. ‘He even drilled a hole in the bathroom ceiling to watch them bathing. And he once hid in the wardrobe so he could peek at one of my girls.’

When Sandra became pregnant with Coutts’s child, the father-to-be was anything but overjoyed. In fact, he informed her that he did not want children and was emigrating to South Africa. ‘As I already had five kids, I had a termination. He came
back from South Africa five weeks later and didn’t even mention the baby.’

Recounting Coutts’s movements around this time, Sandra said that he would disappear often, sometimes for an entire weekend. ‘He said he needed space and would go up north, saying he was seeing friends, playing at a gig or visiting his parents in Scotland.’

Coutts could be very secretive about his sojourns ‘up north’ and would often become quite aggressive if Sandra scrutinised him too closely. Sometimes she would pick up the phone and it would be a girl wanting to speak to Graham. He would explain these calls away, offering that they were ‘groupies’ who were obsessed by him because he was a musician.

His temper was a force to be reckoned with too. When enraged he would grow very pale and literally froth at the mouth. He would scream obscenities at Sandra, branding her worthless and unstable. The fact that he was the sole cause of her anxieties seemed to go unnoticed by him.