Murder.com

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  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.

  Coutts physically attacked Sandra on a number of occasions. Although she was inevitably distressed by these incidents, nothing he did could compare with the ‘emotional battering’ that he constantly subjected her to. As an aside to all this terrible abuse, he told Sandra he thought it would be a good idea to get married and, as she later made clear, he was an obsessive list-maker, even going as far as to keep a record of potential wedding guests. ‘I would never have married him,’ Sandra said firmly. ‘Deep down I knew he was mad.’

  In 1995, while Coutts was away on business, Sandra made an unpleasant discovery. He had, for some time, kept a locked briefcase under their bed. With him out of the house for a while, Sandra, whose curiosity had long since got the better of her, took the opportunity to prise open the mystery case. What she found unnerved her.

  Inside was a large cache of pornographic snapshots of girls ‘trussed up’. On one photograph Coutts had taken the liberty of drawing a ligature around the neck of a girl he worked with.

  This doodling and doctoring of photographic images is fairly common among perverted sexual fantasists. Gerard Schaefer, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy and serial murderer whose grisly signature was to hang the girls he murdered, was shown to have kept a collection very similar to Coutts’s. Schaefer had even drawn crude nooses around the necks of models in magazines to accommodate his burgeoning preoccupation with the asphyxiation of young women.

  Then there was one of Coutts’s meticulous lists with each of the girls’ names on it, all in sequence. When Sandra confronted him about this sinister trove, he reacted with typical melodrama, begging her for forgiveness and insisting that he could never harm anyone, that the pictures were just fuel for fantasies he kept safely stored in his brain. There was no danger of them ever spilling over into reality and engulfing somebody. Honestly, it was the truth. He even promised to seek help, he told her.

  A few nights later, however, with the storm apparently over, Coutts wandered into the bedroom with that familiar strange look in his eye. When Sandra asked him what was wrong, she was met with a vicious punch to the eye that sent her reeling. As she lay there on the carpet, shocked and hurt, Coutts let her know that he had a strong feeling he was going to rape and kill someone before long. He then abruptly turned and left the bewildered woman where she lay.

  Later, after a phone call from his father and with the deranged Coutts crying and mumbling incoherently, it was decided once and for all that he needed psychological help. Coutts, in fact, went as far as actually making an appointment but later refused to attend when he learned that the psychologist was a woman.

  In the end, his doctor prescribed a course of antidepressants. But he would not take them, telling Sandra that he was worried they might negatively affect his sex drive. Despairing, Sandra finally ended her relationship with this human pressure cooker in April 1996, when her 18-year-old son Daniel died.

  Daniel had absolutely despised Coutts and the intolerable atmosphere he brought to the home. The teenager spent long periods away from the house in order to escape this egotistical interloper and ultimately drifted towards crime as an outlet. Tragically, he was to fall to his death from a rooftop during a burglary. ‘I often wonder if Daniel would have turned to crime if Coutts hadn’t been living with us,’ Sandra later said. ‘He really hated him.’

  Soon after Daniel’s death, and probably sensing that Coutts felt it was about time to move on to victimise someone else, Sandra ordered her partner to leave her home. Coutts readily agreed.

  When he met Lisa Stephens, his love of dangerous sex games did not, of course, diminish, and through her he met Jane Longhurst. Jane fitted his fantasy-female profile to a T. From the moment he saw her, it was quite simply a case of biding his time. As the urges within this fledgling homicidal madman grew, the visage of lovely Jane Longhurst burned within him. One day he would have her. When he was finally ready to explode, her name was at the very top of his list.

  After Sandra Gates’s testimony, one of the items on the agenda at Court 1 was the reassembling of the jury at the Big Yellow Storage Company in Brighton. The prosecution wanted them to witness the conditions under which Jane’s desecrated corpse had been stashed.

  Judge Richard Brown had agreed to this request for the jury to visit the premises where Jane had been left in a large cardboard box sealed with heavy-duty tape. However, the storage unit had since been rendered unusable, so they viewed the premises of a similar unit belonging to the company. Accompanied by counsel for the defence and the prosecution, they examined the kind of conditions that Coutts, under his false name of Paul Kelly, had returned to time and time again, utilising an ‘out-of-hours’ key to enter the unit and commit further atrocities on Jane’s decomposing body.

  During the 13-day trial, the jury were also given a graphic demonstration by forensic scientist Roger Ide of how a pair of tights found with Jane’s corpse had been tied around her neck. To simulate this chilling act he used a plastic drinks bottle wrapped in foam and filled with water; this was to represent a human neck. He then proceeded to knot a pair of tights around the bottle.

  Addressing the court, Ide suggested that Jane must have been either upright and face-to-face with her killer as he applied the ligature, or lying on her back, after concluding that a half-knot had been tied in the tights to the front side of her neck.

  This image of Coutts kneeling over Jane as he strangled the life from her was a very potent one indeed. Mr Gold, for the defence, attempted to conjure a degree of co-operation between the two parties but Ide disagreed. ‘No!’ he said firmly. ‘The victim was intimidated, overpowered, or forced.’

  A pathologist later told the court how she had to use scissors to cut the cruelly knotted implement of death from Jane’s neck.

  Given that there was overwhelming physical evidence coupled with the numerous CCTV images of Graham Coutts’s various murder-related outings, the case really looked like it could only go one way; and a startling image captured by cameras at Big Yellow showed Coutts hefting along his trophy box. The fact that Jane Longhurst was inside it must have seared the gravity of what was being viewed into every member of the jury.

  It was time next to turn to the defendant’s hoard of gruesome internet porn. The prosecution suggested an ‘obvious parallel between the images Coutts chose to access on his computer and the scene that confronted him at the storage location.’ Briefly eyeing Coutts, who sat with his head down, the prosecution turned back to the jury and added, ‘He acted out, for real, on the unfortunate Jane Longhurst, the fantasies on his computer, the strangling, the killing and the raping of her.’

  Under cross-examination, Coutts maintained the fiction that all this stemmed from a mutually agreed sex game that had gone tragically wrong, and at one point he even managed to summon tears as he spoke of Jane.

  The jury were unmoved.

  On Wednesday, 4 February 2004, they returned a unanimous verdict: guilty of murder. Coutts displayed no visible emotion as Judge Brown quickly passed a mandatory life sentence with a recommended minimum of 30 years to serve.

  And he had some final words for Graham Coutts: ‘By persisting in your denial and making her [Jane’s] loved ones relive her last moments, and the unbelievable degradation of her body, you have shown not a jot of remorse… everything that this court has heard about Jane Longhurst shows her to have been the sort of person whose life enriched all those who came into contact with her. Her undoubted love of her partner, her music and her life screamed out of every page of evidence I have heard on this case.’

  Focusing sternly on the man in the dock, he continued, ‘In seeking perverted sexual gratification by way of your sordid and evil fantasies, you have taken her life and devastated the lives of those she loved and of those who loved her.’

  As Coutts was escorted from the witness box, he was jeered and shouted at by members of the gallery. There were yells for him to face Jane’s
stricken family and he was called a ‘pig’ and a ‘pervert’ by Sandra Gates as he was led away to begin his new life behind bars.

  After the trial, Jane’s boyfriend, Malcolm Sentance, said he had had a very difficult time in court watching as all the evidence was presented and having to ‘swallow his tongue’where Coutts, whom he described as ‘subhuman’, was concerned. In reference to the killer’s outrageous assertion that Jane had willingly submitted to his desires, Sentance said, ‘That’s the biggest insult. Coutts is a devious man. There’s no truth in anything he said from the word go. If it wasn’t for the internet, Jane would still be alive. But until 50 women are rounded up, raped and murdered I don’t suppose anyone will act. I hope Coutts doesn’t kill himself. I want him to suffer for 30 years.’

  Jane’s mother, Liz Longhurst, said Coutts was ‘vile and disgusting’. Seventy-two-year-old Mrs Longhurst, who had sat in court throughout the trial, described her daughter as a beautiful person who was loved by everybody who knew her. She said, ‘Today is a relief for us all. We have had one of the most difficult years that we have had to endure.’ As Mrs Longhurst continued fighting back her tears, she said, ‘I feel pressure should be brought to bear on internet service providers to close down or filter out these pornographic sites, so that people like Jane’s killer may no longer feed their sick imaginations.’ She added, ‘They [internet service providers] must take some responsibility. Hopefully, we can now campaign to end this despicable use of the soul.’

  Sandra Gates, who had endured the monster for far too long, commented, ‘I was shocked but not surprised that he finally killed someone.’

  Indeed, considering how deeply entrenched his fantasies were, it is extremely likely that, if undetected, Coutts would have gone on to kill again and again to satisfy his terrible lust for dead females.