Two people smugglers who ran a ‘Tripadvisor’ travel service for illegal immigrants from a Welsh car wash have been jailed.

Migrants would leave reviews on social media on videos filmed inside lorries or boats for the journeys arranged by Dilshad Shamo, 43, and Ali Khdir, 42.

The pair smuggled about 100 migrants to Europe weekly for two years via planes, boats, lorries, taxis and cars.

Iraqi-born Shamo and Iranian-born Khdir made a turnover of £1.8million in just six months secretly running the operation out of the carwash in Caerphilly.

Recorder of Cardiff, Tracey Lloyd Clarke, told them: ‘You were both the organisers of a large and sophisticated network which enabled the successful illegal movement of a very large number of migrants from Iran, Iraq, and Syria into and across Europe.

‘You provided that service to almost anyone who was prepared to pay your fees.’

She added: ‘You were friends and operated the Fast Track Car Wash on Pontygwindy Road in Caerphilly.

‘You were both involved in trafficking individuals – that is people smuggling – for financial gain. Those people were predominantly from Iran, Iraq or Syria.

‘Migrants paid, often thousands of pounds, to be trafficked by you and many other by various routes.’

The smugglers moved people from Iraq, Iran and Syria through the EU to Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, Germany, France and Britain.

The duo, who lived and worked legally in Britain, ran the operation using a Middle Eastern money-transfer system called Hawala banking.

They offered migrants a multi-tier service, with higher fees for premium modes of transport.

And they encouraged their customers to rate the journeys in videos including one in which a man sat at the back of a lorry gives a thumbs up after being asked how his route was, and a another involving an Iranian family smuggled to Europe who shout: ‘God bless you, we are very grateful.’

In another video, a migrant says: ‘Lorry route agreed with knowledge of the driver; here we have men, women and children – thank God the route was easy and good.’

Further footage shows men smiling to the camera as they pointed to at least a dozen other migrants travelling on a boat.

Derek Evans, NCA branch commander, said Shamo and Khdir ran the illegal business ‘like a travel agency.’

‘It’s like Tripadvisor, they were rating their service within that community,’ he added.

The ‘platinum’ tier cost between £10,000 and £25,000 and would provide migrants with a fake passport and air travel.

The second highest tier, the ‘gold’ service, came with transport via ship for between £8,000 and £10,000, while the bronze service for between £3,000 and £5,000 involved travel on a lorry or dinghy across the Channel.

The pair are thought to have transported thousands of people across Europe, making enormous profits.

Mr Evans said: ‘Our long-running investigation showed Khdir and Shamo were working around the clock to orchestrate the movement of migrants across Europe. We believe they smuggled more than 400 people in a period of just six months.’

Very little of the profits have been recovered, as the processing was done through the Hawala system.

‘So, most of that money is still in Iraq or Kurdistan,’ Mr Evans said.

Shamo and Khdir, of Caerphilly, South Wales, admitted five counts of conspiring to breach migration laws in Italy, Romania, Croatia and Germany.

Cardiff Crown Court heard the offences – under the 1971 Immigration Act – are alleged to have been carried out between October 2022 and April 2023.

Shamo and Khdir were each jailed for 19 years and told they must serve at least 40 per cent of their sentence behind bars.

Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann has admitted to murdering eight women, bringing some closure to the case that has terrorized Long Island for more than three decades.

Standing inside Suffolk County Court on Wednesday, the hulking architect, husband and father pleaded guilty to seven murders dating back to 1993 – and admitted to an eighth he had not yet been charged with.

In a matter-of-fact tone and with a noticeably calm demeanor, the 62-year-old uttered the words ‘guilty’ as the charge sheet was read aloud. When asked one by one how he killed the victims, he simply uttered: ‘Strangulation.’

The sudden change in plea marks the first time that Heuermann has confessed to being the infamous serial killer. It is also the first time victims’ causes of death have been revealed. 

Under the plea agreement, Heuermann has waived all rights to appeal and will not face any additional charges over the eight murders. He will return to court on June 17 for his sentencing, where he faces up to seven life sentences. 

The longevity of his activity, the brutality of the killings and the long-term evasion and taunting of law enforcement cement him as one of the country’s most notorious serial killers.

His victims had all been working as sex workers in the New York City and Long Island area when they suddenly vanished. Their remains – some of them mutilated and dismembered – were found dumped in remote areas of Long Island.

After evading capture for decades – during which time he raised a family in Massapequa Park and ran an architecture firm in the heart of Midtown Manhattan – Heuermann was arrested in July 2023.

Heuermann was initially charged with the murders of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, and Amber Costello, 27 – who together with Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, were known as the ‘Gilgo Four.’ 

Authorities later linked him to the killings of Brainard-Barnes, Jessica Taylor, 20, Sandra Costilla, 28, and Valerie Mack, 24, bringing the total to seven women.

For the past three years, he has maintained his innocence, pleading not guilty and fighting tooth and nail against the charges.

But in a sudden reversal, he changed his plea to guilty and admitted to the murder of an eighth victim, 34-year-old Karen Vergata.

Heuermann’s defense attorney, Michael Brown, said after the hearing that his client decided he wanted to accept responsibility and not proceed to trial, though he did not say why.

But Brown admitted that the evidence against them was overwhelming, saying the state ‘did a great job.’

When asked if Heuermann was sorry, Brown replied: ‘I would hope so.’ Brown said he believes it was a ‘sense of relief’ for Heuermann to plead guilty today and he expects the serial killer will make a statement at his sentencing.

Brown explained that the deal not to bring more prosecutions only includes the eight women, not other potential victims out there yet to be found. 

There have been other victims linked to the Gilgo Beach murders but Heuermann claims he has no other victims.

Heuermann’s ex-wife, Asa Ellerup, and their daughter, Victoria, briefly addressed reporters outside the courthouse following the hearing.

She read a statement that described the ‘immeasurable’ pain her husband caused to his victims’ families. She then turned to her daughter and refused to take questions, asking reporters to respect her family’s privacy. 

Bob Macedonio, Asa and Victoria’s lawyer, said that the family were out of town every time the murders took place.

He added that Asa ‘never wanted to believe the man she was married to for 27 years, the father of Victoria, was capable of such heinous acts.’

Earlier, Asa was seen leaning forward in her chair anxiously as her husband of 20 years was led into the courtroom. 

As he entered each guilty plea, she clutched the seat in front of her. She and Victoria shared a tender moment holding hands as Heuermann was escorted back out of the court. 

Fears of a serial killer first emerged back in 2010 when the remains of the first of 11 bodies were discovered along the remote stretch of Ocean Parkway, close to Gilgo Beach.

The harrowing discovery came during a search for 24-year-old Shannan Gilbert, who had made a chilling 911 call and then disappeared following a visit to a client’s house in nearby Oak Park that May.

That December, Barthelemy’s remains were the first to be found. Within days, Brainard-Barnes, Waterman and Costello were found close by.

By the spring of 2011, 10 victims had been found in the area. The final victim found was Gilbert, who, to this day, investigators maintain died by accident and is not linked to the serial killer case.

Another 13 years would pass before a suspect fell on investigators’ radar, as the case was notoriously hampered by the actions of disgraced, corrupt former Suffolk County Police Commissioner James Burke.

Heuermann was ultimately tied to the serial killings through a witness tip about his pickup truck as well as damning cellphone evidence. 

The serial killer had used a trove of different burner phones to contact some of the victims, with location data placing the user near both Heuermann’s family home in Massapequa Park and his office in Midtown Manhattan.

With a suspect in sight, investigators then obtained crucial DNA evidence from a discarded pizza crust, which proved Heuermann to be the source of a hair found on Waterman’s body.

It later emerged that hairs belonging to his wife, Asa Ellerup, daughter Victoria Heuermann and another individual close to him had been found on six of the seven victims for which he was charged.

Despite this DNA evidence, none of these individuals is believed to be connected to Heuermann’s crimes.

Suffolk County DA Tierney has previously revealed that Ellerup, the couple’s daughter Victoria and Ellerup’s son Christopher Sheridan – who Heuermann raised as his own – were all out of town on vacation at the time of the murders.

Investigators now believe that Heuermann would stay home during family vacations and use that time to commit his crimes. 

It is believed that he held his victims inside the basement of the family home – a place where he had spent his childhood before choosing to also raise his own children there – where they were tortured, murdered and, in some cases, dismembered.

A disturbing ‘planning document’, found on a hard drive during a search, revealed what prosecutors described as his blueprint for selecting, killing and disposing of victims. 

The document included sections titled ‘body prep’ detailing how to clean and dismember bodies and remove tattoos.

Other chilling evidence also emerged, including his sick porn searches for ‘autopsy photos of female,’ ‘tied up fat girl porn,’ ‘skinny white teen crying porn’ and ‘stories of rape audio’ – as well as his online obsession with the Gilgo Beach serial killer case.

Based on Heuermann’s sudden change in plea, his earliest known victim is now believed to be Costilla, a Trinidad and Tobago native living in Queens when she vanished in 1993. 

Her body was found days later in a wooded area in North Sea, bearing sharp force injuries to her face and body. 

For years, her murder was not believed to be connected to the Gilgo Beach case and another serial killer, John Bittrolf, was eyed as a suspect, until advanced DNA testing recently identified a hair on her body as belonging to Heuermann. 

Meanwhile, the killings continued. 

Three years later, in February 1996, Mack – long known as ‘Fire Island Jane Doe’ – was last seen alive in Manhattan while working as an escort. 

That April, her dismembered legs were found wrapped in plastic on Fire Island’s Blue Point Beach. In April 2011, her skull was found off Ocean Parkway.

It would take another 12 years before she was finally identified through investigative genetic genealogy. 

Mack, a mother-of-one, was then last seen alive in Philadelphia in 2000. 

Her dismembered remains were found in two separate locations – Manorville in 2000 and Ocean Parkway in 2011. 

Like Vergata, her family only learned she had been murdered years later when she was identified in 2020.

Jessica Taylor’s partial remains were also found close to Mack in both Manorville and Ocean Parkway. 

The 20-year-old from Poughkeepsie had been last seen in July 2003 at the Port Authority in New York – a short walk from Heuermann’s office. 

Her tattoo had been disfigured, as though to prevent identification – like the ‘planning document’ detailed.

Investigators say these earlier killings predate what became known as the ‘Gilgo Four’ – the cluster of murders that first drew national attention. 

The first of those victims to disappear was 25-year-old Brainard-Barnes, who went to meet a client in July 2007 and never returned. 

Heuermann had bound her body with three leather belts, one of which contained his wife’s DNA. 

Almost exactly two years later – while his family was away on vacation – 24-year-old Barthelemy vanished after going to meet a client. 

As her loved ones searched for her, the killer used her phone to make chilling, taunting calls, mocking her family and bragging about the murder. 

The following summer, in June 2010, Waterman was last seen alive leaving a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge to meet a client.

The last known victim was Costello, who left her home to meet a client in September 2010. 

Her roommate told police the client was ‘ogre-like’ and driving a distinctive green Chevy Avalanche – the car Heuermann drove at the time.

Three months later, the serial killer’s graveyard was discovered. 

The victims’ family members, who have waited years for answers and justice in the case, learned two weeks ago that their loved ones’ killer was changing his plea to guilty, Newsday first reported.

Since the news broke, Mack’s son has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Heuermann, Ellerup and Victoria – paving the way for further potential civil action against the serial killer.

Since his arrest, Heuermann has been held in isolation inside Suffolk County Jail.

Now, he faces life in prison when he is sentenced in the coming weeks. 

For a moment, as she sat in a courtroom in North Wales last week, Sarah Gunther had to fight the urge to leap from her seat, throw herself at the young man standing in the glass-panelled dock and demand answers.

‘Obviously, I was trying to stay strong,’ she says. ‘But there was a point when I just wanted to just get in there and shake him, to say to him, “What have you done?”‘

She scanned the face of the young man, once so achingly familiar – someone she’d watched grow from a sweet-faced baby, to troubled little boy, to a young man on the cusp of adulthood – looking for something; recognition, contrition, anything.

There was nothing.

Impassive, Tristan Roberts, 18, stood before Mold Crown Court to be sentenced for the incomprehensible murder of his own mother – Sarah’s sister Angela Shellis.

Beside Sarah sat Tristan’s elder brother Ethan, a 20-year-old worn down by the weight of grief and the void left by ‘the best mum anyone could ask for’.

She was, they both agree, a mother who had loved her younger boy unconditionally, who had fought for him tirelessly.

A mother who had begged for help again and again, only to be failed by a system that couldn’t – or wouldn’t – listen. 

As shown in the hauntingly prescient email, shared with her sister, that Angela had written to her local health board, just 14 months before Tristan, who had ADHD and autism, marched her to her carefully planned execution.

‘I will not give up fighting for my son,’ she implored. ‘I will not lose him to mental health/criminality or worse. Do something!’

In the end, both were lost: him, to the criminality she feared; she, to her son’s callous hand.

Standing in the dock, Tristan showed not a flicker of emotion, as he was jailed for life for murder – a crime he’d admitted, but for which he has never given any explanation. ‘I don’t think he showed any remorse. At some points I think he was even smirking,’ says Sarah, 44.

What was documented during that court hearing was, even to the most hardened of observers, shocking. 

Fuelled by a violent hatred towards women, Tristan spent hours locked in a toxic online world, fixated on the notion that his ‘devoted’ 45-year-old mother – who had given up her teaching career to look after him – was to blame for his unhappiness, and discussing his plans to kill her.

In the run-up to the murder, he’d used the AI search engine DeepSeek to ask for tips for a ‘non-experienced killer’, including whether he should use a knife or a hammer.

After it refused to engage, Tristan tricked it by lying that he was writing a book about serial killers.

DeepSeek suggested a hammer would be better and gave the pros and cons for both.

Angela, of course, knew none of this. It’s what makes it all the more tragic when Sarah and Ethan, speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, recall the glimmer of hope she’d clung to as Tristan prepared to celebrate his 18th birthday in October – just two weeks before he killed her.

‘He didn’t want a big fuss,’ says Sarah, ‘so I remember she was excited when he said he wanted to have an evening of whiskies and Coke, because he was 18, with a takeaway and watching Dexter together. It felt like a bonding thing.’ Dexter, a cult Amercian TV series about a serial killer, was his favourite show.

A modest request, but huge to a mother desperate to connect with the little boy who’d once ran to her with a scuffed knee, but who now could barely tolerate her.

In court last week, it was revealed that this simple request was anything but innocent. For two days before his birthday, Tristan had also asked AI whether if someone drank ‘enough whisky and Coke’, would they ‘be able to defend themself’.

In the end, Tristan abandoned his birthday plans. Instead, he went to his local branch of The Range to buy a knife and disposable razors: being 18, he could legally buy weapons now, too.

Then on October 24 last year, Tristan went through with his evil plans. First, he held his mother prisoner in her bedroom, attacking her with a hammer and strangling her, then he forced a balaclava over her head, led her to a nature reserve near their Prestatyn home and bludgeoned her to death – while recording every moment on a dictaphone.

The depths of the depravity wrought that night haunt Sarah, who worked alongside her sister as a teaching assistant at Rhyl High School, and Ethan, who has paused his second year studying computer science at Warwick University.

There has been precious little time for this gentle pair to grieve. Their grief is layered with a litany of unanswered questions.

Of course, there’s the fundamental question of why Tristan did what he did. But more than that there’s the question of why, when Angela had spent years begging for help – from social services, from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) – was so little action forthcoming?

The court was told Angela, who trained as a primary teacher in her 30s but had opted to work as a teaching assistant to devote more time to her troubled son, had ‘repeatedly tried to obtain support’, with ‘limited success’.

Ethan and Sarah can’t emphasise enough how tirelessly Angela fought: ‘My strength is I want these people held accountable,’ says Sarah. ‘CAMHS, social services. Their job is to protect people, to help people who need help, and they didn’t do it.’ Ethan agrees: ‘I’d said to Mum, ‘What is it going to take for them [the authorities] to see he’s not well? How long can this go on?’.’

There has been shock upon shock. ‘I’d gone months trying to think it was an in-the-moment thing, that he’d had a mental health episode or that someone else was involved,’ says Sarah.

‘Then getting told there was planning and purchases and online chats . . . You can’t prepare yourself for that.’

Tristan, it was revealed, had spent weeks in his bedroom, pouring out his thoughts on the controversial platform Discord.

He had posted numerous messages, describing his need for ‘revenge, justice, vengeance’. Aunt and nephew hold their emotions close, but they are broken. ‘I think he sort of blames himself,’ Sarah says of her nephew. ‘And I probably do the same. Did I miss this? Did I miss that? The questions are just for ever in my head.’

What’s indisputable is that all Angela had ever done for her son was fight for him. Tristan was just six when diagnosed with autism.

At the time the family were living in Luton with both boys attending mainstream schools. Angela fought for Tristan to transfer to another school with the requisite resources to help him.

Ethan remembers: ‘Obviously, he was an autistic kid, he was annoying, he caused problems, but not serious problems. We’d go out with Mum on the weekends a lot,’ he says, with the flicker of a smile. ‘Cinema, out with the dogs, camping, coming to Wales to visit my grandparents or Sarah.’

She loved to travel, so there were countless big family holidays. Sarah and Ethan struggle to reconcile these times with the twisted tale Tristan wove online – describing an ‘entire life’ of ‘hell, abandonment, betrayal’.

‘He had the same upbringing as me,’ says Ethan, betrayal flickering in his eyes. ‘He had the least traumatic upbringing.’

There was one upset, however. In 2021, Angela’s 20-year marriage to husband Mark, the boys’ father, had broken down and two years later she moved to Wales to be closer to her own family, and to the boys’ paternal grandparents.

Her younger son was given a choice to stay with his dad or go with them. He opted to move to Wales. He enrolled at a local school, but struggled and failed his GCSEs before beginning – and being asked to leave – an access course at college.

‘Some days he’d walk around town all day, no one knows what he was doing,’ says Ethan. ‘At home there’d be times he didn’t leave his room for like 12 or 20 hours.’

Angela, meanwhile, had discovered her son was self-harming and referred him to CAMHS.

Then in 2024, there were two significant escalations. First Tristan disappeared on a visit to his father and was found, after frantic public appeals and police searches, sleeping on a town centre bench.

Then came a caravan holiday to Scotland with his mother and aunt. There was a trivial row over a mobile phone one evening and Tristan ‘flipped’. ‘He was punching her on the head and I had to go into her bedroom and drag him off,’ says Sarah.

Ethan was in the US that summer, working at an American camp before going to university, and remembers his mother telling him about it on his return.

‘It was one of the only times I ever saw her upset,’ he says. ‘She was crying, about losing her son, that she couldn’t reach him any more.’

Tristan was admitted to the children’s ward (not a psychiatric unit) at Glan Clwyd hospital, in Rhyl. ‘I’d say there were four to five days of meetings with CAMHS workers, social services, video calls of me and Ange literally screaming, ‘He needs help’.

‘Two minutes later, they’d go into the room with Tristan and he’d go, ‘But I’m fine’.’

Ethan also couldn’t understand it all: ‘They believed him,’ he says. ‘Not the responsible adults, looking after him every day.’ Time, perhaps, will provide answers.

Denbighshire County Council said last week that it and ‘partner organisations’ had referred the case to North Wales Safeguarding Board and couldn’t comment.

Tristan was eventually released from hospital into homeless accommodation – which he trashed – before a month later being arrested for theft and possessing a knife in a public place.

There was talk of him being sectioned, but it didn’t happen. So, by the summer of last year, he was back home, living with his mother.

His behaviour spiralled: he began refusing to wash or care for himself, developed an obsession with knives and hammers, and all the while his animosity towards Angela grew.

The chilling parallels with the case of Axel Rudakubana, the autistic 17-year-old who murdered three girls in Southport in July 2024, are hard to ignore.

Ethan worried about leaving his mother alone as he headed back to university, but Angela reassured him she would be OK.

Sarah and Ethan’s memories of that final week in October are still raw. Angela visited her sister, as she did at least a couple of times a week, for a cup of tea on the Tuesday. Normally, there’d be bingo on a Thursday night, but after a tough day and bad weather, they both agreed they wouldn’t bother.

There’d been text exchanges with Ethan too – about his plans for dinner and the weekend – ‘just normal stuff,’ he says. But that ‘normal’ was about to be shattered.

At first Sarah didn’t think much of it when she couldn’t reach her sister the following morning, but then she saw a worrying post on Facebook about the discovery of a woman’s body in Prestatyn.

‘Of course, your mind starts swirling,’ she says. ‘There had always been a sixth sense between Ange and me. Like she’d know if there was something wrong with me and I’d know if there was something wrong with her.’

Ethan, meanwhile, was also worried when his mum didn’t answer her mobile. When he received a text from her phone, claiming she had a sore throat, he automatically ‘knew it was Tristan’.

Sarah called the police before dashing to the family home with the boys’ paternal grandparents.

There they found a fortress: the front door barricaded by a bookcase, the back by two dining chairs with weights taped to them.

Sarah managed to push her way inside, desperate to find Angela. Instead she found her nephew, in the bathroom. ‘I haven’t done anything, leave me alone,’ he said.

The police arrived shortly afterwards, capturing his arrest on camera. Later, they found chilling Ring doorbell footage from a neighbour’s home, showing Angela – limping and leaning on a crutch from earlier knee surgery – and her son, leaving the house at 3.19am.

Ethan made a moving personal impact statement to court in which he described the hell of his four-hour bus journey home, ‘running over and over in my mind what could have happened’.

Today, he feels anger and guilt, even a little anger towards his mum. Why didn’t she fight, scream or struggle more?

‘She was probably trying to calm him down because that’s what she’d always done . . . to de-escalate the situation,’ says Sarah.

What haunts them most though is the knowledge that none of this needed to happen. Ethan doesn’t know how he feels about his brother now. ‘I hope he gets help, but I don’t really care,’ he says.

Sarah, adds: ‘I can’t say I don’t love him, I can’t bring myself to say that. I’m hoping that in time somebody will see that he does actually need help. I think that’s what my sister would want, even after all this.’

Two months after Lin Russell and her six-year-old daughter Megan were bludgeoned to death on a summer’s afternoon in July 1996, police searching a hedgerow near the crime scene made a chilling discovery.

It was a wooden-handled hammer, like that found in many household toolboxes. And although it was never conclusively linked to the attack, which was carried out in broad daylight, it was consistent with the catastrophic blows to the head which killed Lin and her youngest child, and left her older daughter Josie, then nine, bloodied and unconscious.

Tied to a tree and blindfolded, Josie heard her mother’s dying screams before she too was set about by the killer but, despite her terrible injuries, she somehow survived what one detective described as ‘the most horrific murder [scene] I have had the misfortune to come across in my 23 years as a police officer.’

A year later, a BBC Crimewatch reconstruction led to 38-year-old Michael Stone, a violent heroin addict, being locked up for the murders.

He is still behind bars today but has long protested his innocence and, as the Mail reported exclusively last month, his case is being reviewed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which will decide if it should be referred to the Court of Appeal.

If Stone’s name is cleared, it would be one of the longest-running miscarriages of justice in British criminal history — second only to the 38 years wrongfully served by Peter Sullivan, the so-called ‘Beast of Birkenhead’, who was released last year after new DNA findings cleared him of killing 21-year-old florist Diane Sindall in a frenzied sexual attack on Merseyside in 1986.

Like Sullivan, Stone has never stopped protesting his innocence, even turning down the possibility of parole in 2022 because accepting it would require him to admit guilt.

Also like Sullivan, he hopes that advanced analysis techniques available today might uncover new clues in the physical evidence gathered from the crime scene.

Today we examine those clues in more detail — starting with questions about the weapon used in the crazed assault on Lin Russell and her daughters.

WHERE IS THE MURDER WEAPON?

It took place near the village of Chillenden, about eight miles northwest of Dover and in one of the most scenic parts of rural Kent. Walking the girls home from school before their Brownies meeting later that afternoon, 45-year-old geologist Lin took them along Cherry Garden Lane, a quiet bridlepath that they often used as a shortcut.

At 7.30pm, Lin’s husband Shaun, a 45-year-old university lecturer, returned to their cottage after work and was puzzled to find nobody there. Lin and the girls should have been back from Brownies by then and by 9pm he was so worried that he called the police.

Within a few hours, they had found the tragic trio lying in a clearing off Cherry Garden Lane. With them was their beloved family pet, a white terrier named Lucy, who was also clubbed to death.

When officers first arrived at the bloody scene, there appeared to be no signs of life and Shaun was told that his wife and both daughters were dead. But then a policeman noticed Josie moving and the battle to save her life began.

By the autumn, she was making a miraculous recovery and could communicate with the police, recalling how the murderer took a hammer from the back of his car before approaching them and demanding money.

Josie’s account was consistent with the pathologist’s report which said that the catastrophic blows to the victims’ heads had been inflicted by an object with a circular face of approximately 3cm in diameter. But was this the only weapon used?

Stone’s lengthy submission to the CCRC includes an 18-page dossier by Angela Gallop, the UK’s leading cold-case forensic expert. She has helped solve high-profile cases ranging from the racially-motivated murder of south London teenager Stephen Lawrence to the killing of young mother Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, in front of her two-year-old son.

Together with Dr Philip Avenell, an expert in DNA profiling, Gallop went back to the original evidence, including photographs which helped them reconstruct the crime scene, and made a startling observation.

‘A number of sticks from the trees nearby were lying on the ground on and around the bodies, and some of these were heavily bloodstained.

‘One stick in particular, which had been lying with others on top of Lin’s lower right leg, had spots and splashes of blood radiating away from heavier staining on it, suggesting its use as a weapon during the attack.’

Describing how this and other branches had been used to ‘strike a wet, blood-stained surface with force,’ the report recommends that they should be tested for traces of DNA, especially in the areas where the murderer was likely to have gripped them.

This is potentially a vital step in freeing Stone whose 63-year-old sister Barbara, a mental health nurse and longtime campaigner for his release, was ‘stunned’ to hear of the emphasis which Angela Gallop placed on the sticks surrounding the bodies.

‘One of the most surprising aspects of the report for me and my brother is the frequent references to other items that were covered in blood, and which could have been used as a weapon,’ she told the Daily Mail.

‘That is the first time either of us have ever heard of this as being a possibility.’

She believes that detectives were determined to prove her brother’s guilt from the moment they discovered the offence for which he had previously been put away.

They were alerted to this by his psychiatrist Dr Philip Sugarman who watched that Crimewatch reconstruction, timed to coincide with the first anniversary of the then still unsolved murders.

He was struck by an e-fit, based on the recollections of a witness who saw an angry-looking man driving away from the area. Josie had agreed that this looked like the man who set about them and, according to Dr Sugarman, it resembled Stone, then 37 and living in Gillingham, about 50 miles from Chillenden.

His long criminal record featured mainly shoplifting and burglary, but in 1981 he had become involved in an altercation with another man, during which he had picked up a nearby hammer and attacked him with it.

Stone quickly became the police’s prime suspect but the problem was that they couldn’t find, and neither have they ever found, any forensic materials linking him to the murders — not on the hedgerow hammer, or anything else found at or near the crime scene.

He was eventually sent for trial in 1998 only because of the testimony of three fellow inmates who claimed that he had confessed to the crime while on remand in the segregation unit at Canterbury prison.

Two of those jailhouse confessions were later discredited — thanks in part to an investigation by the Daily Mail. But, although Stone’s conviction was overturned in 2001, a retrial later that year saw him found guilty once again, based on the word of Damien Daley, the remaining prisoner who had testified against him.

Mark McDonald has since given the CCRC evidence that Daley, a drug-addicted gangster, concocted Stone’s ‘confession’ in return for being moved from the strictly regulated segregation unit so that he could access Class A drugs smuggled into the rest of the prison.

Now serving life after murdering a fellow drug dealer in 2014, he is expected to be visited by investigators from the CCRC, which will also be considering claims that the police were highly selective in assessing evidence.

‘I always felt the police and prosecution linked my brother’s previous use of a hammer, 15 years earlier, and then really pushed the value of this to support their theory,’ says Barbara Stone.

Stone’s barrister Mark McDonald, who is also representing former neonatal nurse and convicted baby murderer Lucy Letby as her case is reviewed by the CCRC, agrees.

‘The chaos at the scene made it difficult for them to find a motive and, as a consequence, they may have grasped too soon at one theory without looking at others,’ he says.

WHY WASN’T THERE DNA TESTING?

Among the shortcomings revealed by Angela Gallop’s report is that fingernail scrapings taken from Lin Russell’s left hand were never tested for DNA from her assailant — an omission described as ‘astonishing’ by Stone’s solicitor Paul Bacon.

‘That, to me, is something you would have thought was almost routine,’ he says.

Bacon is also hopeful that DNA might be obtained from the re-testing of a bootlace found along the edge of Cherry Garden Lane, 45 yards from the entrance to the murder scene. It was extensively stained with Megan’s blood, suggesting that it had been used to strangle her.

The lace, which was about 40 inches long, had three knots in it. The prosecution suggested that these were of the kind tied by heroin users in fashioning makeshift tourniquets. But Stone’s defence team believe that this was an interpretation seized upon to connect him to the killings.

Paul Bacon points out that, although extensive testing at the time found traces of male DNA on the lace, none of it was Stone’s, which would be highly surprising if he really had used it as a tourniquet.

‘The lace would presumably be the best possible place to get DNA evidence because if you’re tying something tight around your arm to find a vein, then what part of your anatomy would you use to pull it? The mouth.’

Since it is likely to have been extensively handled by the perpetrator, Stone’s team have previously pushed for further analysis of the lace but, in 2010, Kent Police said it was missing from its storage envelope.

Ten years later, it suddenly reappeared and they are calling for it to be tested again, with a highly sensitive technique known as ‘DNA-17’. Used by laboratories since 2014, this can identify criminals from DNA samples which are very small, old or otherwise degraded.

WHERE’S THE MISSING LUNCHBOX?

Technological advances might also provide more information about the bloody fingerprint found on a green lunchbox belonging to Josie who remembered the attacker searching their bags for cash.

There was not enough detail in that print to make a positive identification but, significantly, there was sufficient to show that it could not have belonged to Michael Stone.

Since it had a partial ‘loop pattern’ similar to that on Lin’s right middle finger, it was assumed, but not proven, to have come from her. An analysis today could offer a more definitive answer but, like the lace, the lunchbox was subsequently mislaid and is still missing.

Given that the lace eventually reappeared, Stone’s defence team are hoping that the CCRC might pressure Kent Police into finding the lunchbox in the same way. And if the print is not Lin’s, perhaps it can identify a known criminal whose prints are already in the police database.

A prime suspect is serial killer Levi Bellfield, a fellow inmate of Stone’s at HMP Frankland in Durham. He is currently serving a whole life sentence for strangling 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler, who went missing from Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in 2002.

He was also convicted of three attacks in south-west London, running down and attempting to kill 18-year-old schoolgirl Kate Sheedy, and murdering students Marsha McDonnell, 19 and Amelie Delagrange, 22, by battering them over the head with a blunt implement.

In 2023, Bellfield made a statement in which he confessed to the Chillenden Murders. But, as Guy Adams reported for The Crime Desk last month, he is a narcissistic psychopath who could be making the whole thing up to attract attention.

A fresh look at the Chillenden evidence is the only way to know for sure, but we may be waiting some time. Although they were given Angela Gallop’s report last September, the Mail understands that the CCRC have yet to begin any such investigations or to interview Damien Daley.

Given the peculiarly heinous nature of the Chillenden Murders, this is disturbing, to say the least.

After all, if neither Michael Stone nor Levi Bellfield are guilty, then the maniac who carried out that senseless outrage on a defenceless mother and her children 30 years ago may still be out there, waiting to strike again.

A hitman raised in the Home Counties was jailed for life without parole on Thursday after gunning down an Albanian businessman in a £1million blood feud assassination suspected of being organised from the UK.

Ruben Saraiva, who grew up in Reading, Berkshire, from the age of four, was disguised as a delivery driver when he strolled into the five-star hotel in a Balkan seaside resort owned by Ardian Nikulaj and blasted him six times.

The ruthless killer had flown from London to Albania two months before the April 2023 attack as the key member of an alleged British hit squad – said to also include a young mother from Bristol – hired to carry out the operation, prosecutors allege.

Amid tight security at Lezhe Court in Northern Albania, Senior Judge Lirim Bulica told Saraiva he would spend the rest of his life in a high security prison after finding him guilty of premeditated murder in collaboration with others and illegal possession of weapons.

Dressed in a black Nike tracksuit as he stood a few yards from his victim’s wife, Saraiva shook his head in the glass fronted dock as the judgement was delivered.

The murder was allegedly masterminded by the member of a rival Albanian family now based in the UK who suspected father of four Nikulaj of killing one of their relatives as part of ‘blood feud’ between the families which has lasted nearly three decades and already claimed nine lives.

The Britons were selected to carry out the operation because, while Nikulaj was on the alert for potential local assassins, he would never have suspected any danger from visitors from England, prosecutors allege.

Saraiva laid in wait in a nearby stairwell of an apartment block for several days while the other Britons checked in to Nikulaj’s newly opened hotel in the seaside resort of Shengjin in northern Albania where they allegedly posed as tourists to spy on him and his family who also worked there.

They are said to have accepted free meals from their unsuspecting victim, chatted with his wife and befriended his then 13-year-old-son as they tracked their target’s movements before one gave the signal for Saraiva to strike.

Horrific CCTV footage captured the moment the now 30-year-old gunman – dressed as in a high viz jacket, motorbike helmet and surgical mask – walks into the hotel’s bar and brandishes the Soviet made pistol before opening fire.

Saraiva fled the murder scene on a motorbike and crossed the border on foot from Albania to Greece a few hours later, but was arrested after subsequently entering Morocco on fake documents and extradited to Albania to face trial.

It is not known how much Saraiva was offered for his role in the operation, but Nikulaj’s family said they had been warned previously that other potential local assassins had previously turned down almost £1million to kill him.

Saraiva was born to Portuguese parents who emigrated to the UK when he was aged four.

He split his time between his father’s home in Reading, Berkshire and his mother’s home in South London. He has convictions in the UK for drug dealing and knife crime in the UK.

Despite living most of his life in the UK, his parents never applied for citizenship so he remains a Portuguese citizen.

On February 14th 2023 he was collected from Tirana airport by British-Albanian Edmond Haxhia who is accused of organising the gang to target Nikulaj.

Haxhia, who lives in Birmingham, is the first cousin of two men from the Lekstakaj family which is embroiled in the long running blood feud with the Nikulaj family, prosecutors told the court.

Under Albanian blood feud tradition, a family must avenge a relative’s murder by killing a male member of the killer’s family – who then have to do the same in return – in an ongoing cycle of bloodshed.

Nikulaj is believed to have been targeted because he is accused of gunning down a Lekstakaj family member in 1997- itself said to be as revenge for the murder of his elder brother after a row over a £15 petrol payment which began the feud. The Nikulaj family deny he was a killer.

Haxhia and the other Britons accused of being part of the surveillance team, Harriet Bridgeman, 28, and Thomas Mithan, 35, Steven Hunt, 50, who are all from Bristol, and Harry Simpson, 33, from South London, returned to the UK shortly before or immediately after the shooting, prosecutor Arben Nika told the court.

They were later arrested are currently awaiting to hear the judgment in their appeal against extradition to Albania to face trial. They all deny involvement in the attack.

In a statement, the Nikulaj family welcomed today’s hearing as ‘step forward in delivering justice for Ardian’ but expressed concern at the delay in extraditing other suspects from the UK.

They added: ‘The brutality of Ardian’s execution with six bullets by Ruben Saraiva, who is now convicted by the Albanian justice, is a wound that will never heal—especially for Ardian’s children, who are growing up without the warmth of their father.’

‘Despite today’s decision regarding Ruben Saraiva, we continue to feel hurt by the fact that Ardian treated all the British individuals who came to his hotel as tourists and treated by him with a deep respect, but in reality, we suspect had come with the intention of surveilling him so that he could later be killed by their accomplice, Ruben Saraiva.’

They added there would be ‘no full justice for Ardian and no peace for the Nikulaj family’ unless those who ordered and financed the murder are ‘identified and brought to justice.’

Outside court, Saraiva’s solicitor Kujtim Cakrani said he planned to appeal.

A teenage boy with a hatred of women was advised how to kill his mother by an AI chatbot.

The disturbing details behind the murder of teaching assistant Angela Shellis came as her son Tristan Roberts, 18, was jailed for life yesterday for bludgeoning her to death with a hammer.

Roberts had posted misogynistic messages and boasted of his chilling intent to kill on a controversial chat forum linked to other murders.

He then asked an AI tool for tips on which weapon to use and how to clean up afterwards. It told him a hammer would be best for ‘a non-experienced killer’.

The case sparked fresh fears about the dark corners of the internet and the growing influence of artificial intelligence, with shocking research suggesting eight out of ten chatbots were willing to assist in planning violent attacks, including school shootings, religious bombings, and high-profile assassinations.

In the weeks leading up to his mother’s death, Roberts, who was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, was repeatedly banned from controversial gaming messaging app Discord, due to the extreme content he was posting. 

Roberts posted about murders, violence, misogyny, weapons, and his intention to kill his mother. 

But he was able to set up at least 16 new accounts and continue his women-hating diatribes.

He then turned to DeepSeek, a Chinese AI search engine already banned in Australia from government devices and systems, for advice on carrying out his crime.

The chatbot initially refused to engage but when he asked again, simply claiming he was researching a book on serial killers, it aided his plotting. 

He asked questions such as ‘how do I remove any trace of blood, of DNA from the killer or victim?,’ how to incapacitate a ‘female aged 45’ and about cutting body parts.

Imran Ahmed, founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which was behind the research that found chatbots happy to indulge such fantasies, said: ‘This is yet another tragic case of an AI chatbot helping a vulnerable young man move from expressing violent intent to acting on it. 

‘Even the most basic safeguards can be bypassed with minimal effort. 

‘How many more people need to die before the tech industry implements strong safeguards, real accountability, and urgent intervention?’

Jailing him for life, with a minimum of 22 years, Judge Rhys Rowlands told Roberts that his mother’s terror during her last moments could not be imagined.

‘It was a truly awful way for someone to die,’ he said. ‘It was made all the more dreadful that her attacker was her own son.’ 

He said that, despite his autism and ADHD diagnoses, Roberts knew exactly what he was doing that night.

A Discord spokesman said the app took decisive action, including removing content and banning bad actors.

‘He’s bought a knife and a hammer,’ Angela texted. ‘Why?? Is he planning to hurt me?’ 

By James Tozer 

For 18 years, Angela Shellis ‘fought tirelessly’ for her son Tristan.

But the ‘unbreakable’ love she felt for her deeply troubled younger boy – as well as his successful university undergraduate elder brother – was to be betrayed in the cruellest manner imaginable.

Diagnosed with autism and ADHD, Tristan Roberts spent hours a day in a toxic online world where he could give vent to his most depraved fantasies.

He was so divorced from reality – and obsessed with violence and mass murderers – that he became fixated on the notion that his ‘devoted’ mother was to blame for his unhappiness.

Fuelled by unjustified anger and poisonous misogyny, which he spouted on the controversial gamers’ messaging app Discord, Roberts began plotting to kill her.

In a chilling glimpse into the insidious power of AI, the teenager turned to the technology’s unmonitored might for tips on what kind of weapons a ‘non-experienced’ killer should use.

Then, Roberts turned 18. He didn’t spend his birthday drinking with friends. 

Instead, he visited a local branch of The Range store chain, where he bought a knife and disposable razors, showing ID to prove he was 18 – the required legal age.

The purchase concerned the cashier, who kept a copy of the teenager’s receipt. The next day he bought another knife. 

Two weeks later, he enacted his callous plot – putting his mother through a four-and-a-half-hour ordeal of unspeakable horror.

Roberts recorded every moment of it. From the initial assault to the final fatal blows. Mercifully for Angela’s family, those moments weren’t played to court. 

It was agony enough for them to hear how Roberts held his 45-year-old mother prisoner in her own bedroom, repeatedly attacking her with a hammer and strangling her. 

He then led her to a nature reserve and bludgeoned her to death with the hammer he had bought on Amazon for £20.

What could possibly have motivated such brutality? That is a question that continues to haunt Angela’s family.

Roberts, who had a fascination with serial killers, including TV series Dexter and the movie American Psycho, has offered no explanation; in police interviews he responded ‘no comment’.

In a note on his laptop a week before the killing he spelt out his twisted desire for ‘vengeance’ against his mother, saying he was ‘Not Tristan Roberts, but Alex’.

Self-pityingly he described his ‘entire life’ as ‘a s***show of f****** hell, just hell, abandonment, betrayal, bullied, nearly froze to death, physical effort, suffering’.

‘All of it and most caused by one person, and not myself.

‘And now that one person, not out of sadistic pleasure or malice, but out of revenge, justice, vengeance and… to move forwards in life, I must take the weight off my back. 

‘Even if it hurts. There is no use living anymore if I don’t do this. I am already dead.’

In notes he wrote before the murder he said he was motivated by ‘hatred of women’. One Discord post read: ‘I do hate girls are you OK with that?’

The platform has been accused in the US of harbouring radical communities including white supremacist far-Right groups. 

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin, Tyler Robinson, is also reported to have been active on the site.

In reality, Roberts’ ungrateful and self-centred attitude was a cruel and insulting inversion of the lifelong sacrifices Ms Shellis had made for both her sons.

Her devotion to her boys is clear from her own social media accounts, peppered with pictures of them. 

‘Home is where my boys are,’ reads one post. ‘I will never understand how some parents live every day knowing they have a child out there they rarely bother about and just get on with their life without a care in the world.’

After separating from the boys’ father, she had moved back from Bedfordshire to the seaside town of Prestatyn in her native North Wales so they could benefit from the support of relatives.

A qualified teacher, described by relatives as having ‘a heart full of love and kindness’, Angela took a lower-paid job as a teaching assistant at Rhyl High School so she could spend more time with her sons. That Roberts needed help was clear.

In childhood, he was referred to Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services. He attended mainstream schools but ‘struggled’ and had a history of disruptive behaviour.

But while he was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, to this day, professionals have detected no recognised mental health disorder – relatives now suspect he ‘manipulated’ doctors.

Adolescence was turbulent: he spent time in hospital, in homeless accommodation and a period with his father in Milton Keynes. 

What support Angela sought – and with what, the court heard, ‘limited success’ – will doubtless become clearer with time. 

Denbighshire County Council said yesterday that it and ‘partner organisations’ had referred the case to North Wales Safeguarding Board and could not comment.

What is known is that the mother and son relationship became ‘strained’. Family members, too, were worried about Roberts’ deteriorating behaviour after the family moved to Prestatyn.

In February 2025 he was given a six-month referral order by Llandudno youth court for possession of a bladed item in a public place and shoplifting. 

Neighbours reported him behaving aggressively towards them, and overheard him shouting in the family’s semi-detached house.

It is a devastating feature of this case that both Angela and her elder son, Ethan, had begun to suspect the threat Roberts represented towards her. 

As Mold Crown Court was told, on October 17 – four days after Roberts had turned 18 – the worried mother messaged a social worker and friends, stating that he had bought a knife and a hammer.

In one note on her phone she asked: ‘Why?? What does he need these for? Is he planning to hurt me, himself, what? Who? Why? FFS.’ 

Ethan too was concerned; before going back to university, he set up wireless-enabled cameras inside the family home. 

But unknown to either of them, Roberts’ plans were escalating.

In the early hours of October 18, he posted messages on Discord stating that he had been standing over his mother holding a hammer as she slept but did not use it.

The next morning, she wrote a note on her phone reading: ‘OMG… I did not sleep well at all… and Tristan kept coming into my room too – why? Am I safe in my room tonight?’ 

Meanwhile, Roberts’ posts on Discord were becoming ever more disturbing. 

In one chat he boasted about being able to chop a bear apart with a weapon. 

Another said: ‘She is gonna just vanish off the earth. I already tried everything else. Now it’s time.’

In a third he wrote: ‘I can kill her bare-handed. I only want to make it brutal and make sure I don’t mess up with an axe.’

His accounts were repeatedly taken down for violating the platform’s policies against abusive and threatening content and his posts deleted. 

But Roberts, who wasn’t in education, kept thousands of screenshots (recovered by police after the murder) and simply set up new user names – a total of 16 different accounts.

In the weeks running up to the murder he used Chinese AI search tool DeepSeek to ask for tips for a ‘non-experienced killer’, including whether he should use a knife or a hammer. 

After it refused to engage, Roberts tricked it by lying that he was writing a book about serial killers.

Once Ethan had gone back to university for the new term, Roberts put his murderous plan into practice. 

Along with weapons, he bought a balaclava, facemasks, overalls and clingfilm.

His mother was particularly vulnerable because she was off work and using crutches due to a leg injury. 

On the evening of October 23, he made a brief voice recording in which he said that he was ‘Alex’ – believed to be his murderous alter ego – and was going to kill his mother. 

The attack began at around 11pm and lasted until 3.30am. ‘This is the moment we are doing it,’ he said. ‘We are going to hit her with a sledgehammer.’

Ms Shellis was conscious before pleading in a ‘calm and firm voice’ for him to phone 999 for medical help. 

She even offered to ‘back him up and say that he had not known what he was doing’, prosecutor Andrew Thomas KC said.

But, preying on her devotion, Roberts convinced her to leave the house, under the pretence she could have her injuries treated.

He ordered her to put on a balaclava – to restrict how far her blood was spread, police suspect – then tricked her into taking a ‘short cut’ through a nature reserve. 

There, he took the sledgehammer out of his rucksack and rained down blows on her, leaving her to die.

He returned home alone at 5.35am and was filmed on a doorbell camera leaving again 50 minutes later, swinging a carrier bag thought to have contained bleach to clean the murder scene. 

He was thwarted by the presence of dog walkers and he returned home.

Later that morning he logged straight back on to Discord, writing: ‘I’ve just had the craziest day.’ 

He said that he had ‘beat the s***’ out of his mother, and described how he had ‘smashed her skull’. 

Angela’s body was found just after 8.30am, but it took police several hours to establish her identity.

Relatives were worried and tried to contact her – but Roberts sent messages from her phone to say she was laid up with a ‘bad throat’.

Ethan sent his mother’s phone a message asking: ‘Just call me for a second… so that I know you are alive.’ 

Roberts – posing as their mother – replied: ‘I think I am alive [laughing emoji]’.

When he was arrested later that day, he had barricaded himself into his bedroom. He calmly asked officers: ‘Is the body you found my mother?’ 

The murder weapon – a £20 ‘mini sledgehammer’ bought on Amazon – was seized at the home.

As he was given a life sentence yesterday, devastated relatives were still struggling to comprehend the tragedy. 

In a powerful victim impact statement to the court, Ethan said their mother had done anything and everything for Roberts ‘his whole life’.

‘Mum never gave up on him. I don’t know how he could do this to anyone, let alone the one person… that would do absolutely anything for him,’ he said.

He felt ‘haunted’ by anger as well as guilt that he was unable to protect his mother.

Her sister, Sarah Gunther, said she wanted her sister to be remembered as ‘a mum who never gave up, no matter what life threw at her’. 

Addressing her nephew directly, she told him how the family ‘fought so hard to try and get you the help you needed’.

This is the moment a misogynistic teen leads his mother to an isolated nature reserve where he recorded himself bludgeoning her to death with a hammer before boasting about it online. 

Chilling CCTV footage shows Tristan Thomas Roberts, 18, luring his mother Angela Shellis, who he previously held hostage for hours, towards the Morfa area before launching a brutal attack. 

And just over two hours later, at around 5.35am on October 24, the teen was seen making his way home by himself and was spotted moments later with plastic bags outside. 

His 45-year-old teaching assistant mother was found dead in the undergrowth beside a footpath near a nature reserve in Prestatyn, north Wales, by walkers the following day.  

Roberts pleaded guilty to murdering his mother last February at Mold Crown Court and has since been sentenced to life behind bars with a minimum term of 22 years and six months.

After bludgeoning Ms Shellis to death, the court heard how the 18-year-old posted on Discord, an online platform, saying: ‘I’ve just had the craziest day’, adding that he had  ‘beat the s*** out of her’ and  ‘smashed her skull in so hard with a sledgehammer’.

The twisted killer also confessed to recording himself keeping the 45-year-old prisoner in her own bedroom before duping her into going outside where he killed her.

Jailing him, Judge Rhys Rowlands said his mother’s terror during her last moments could not be imagined.

‘You appear to have revelled in the control you exerted over your own mother,’ he said. ‘It was on any view a truly awful way for someone to die. 

‘It was made all the more dreadful that her attacker was her own son, someone it is clear she had cared for and indeed worried about in the weeks leading up to her death.’

The judge said Roberts ‘looked forward to inflicting pain’ and ‘enjoyed what you were doing’, before adding that Ms Shellis would ‘no doubt have been terrified’. 

‘Callously you ignored her pleas,’ he said. ‘She must have been truly terrified in these, the last moments of her life.’

Judge Rowlands said his ‘brutal’ actions had caused ‘dreadful anguish’ to his entire family.

He said the ‘sheer cruelty’ of his elaborate murder plot belied his young age, adding that despite his autism and ADHD diagnoses, he knew exactly what he was doing that night.

Roberts, wearing a blue-green zip-up top, and flanked by two security guards, stared straight ahead from the dock as he was sentenced.

The court heard he had spent weeks researching the killing – and then digitally recorded the last hours of his mother’s life.

Andrew Thomas KC, prosecuting, said: ‘These events were recorded by Tristan Roberts on his digital audio device.

‘He made a continuous recording, lasting more than four-and-a-half hours, covering everything from the initial assault to the fatal blows at the end.’

On the recording, he said: ‘This is the moment we are doing it. We are going to hit her with a sledgehammer.’

The court heard he hit her with the hammer before strangling her.

Ms Shellis was conscious before speaking in a ‘calm and firm voice’ to phone 999 for medical help.

The court heard Roberts’s violent attack began at around 11pm and lasted until 3.30am. He recorded it on a voice recorder, ‘too distressing’ to be heard in court.

Roberts – who was fascinated by TV serial killers – used AI search engines to research how to commit murder.

Immediately after turning 18 last October, he took advantage of being legally able to purchase knives to assemble an arsenal of weapons online and from homeware store The Range.

On the night of October 23, he recorded himself holding Ms Shellis prisoner in her own bedroom before leading her to a nature reserve and killing her with a hammer he had bought on Amazon.

The court heard how he spent hours on a controversial gaming messaging app Discord. 

The platform has been accused in the US of harbouring radical communities, including white supremacist far-right groups.

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin, Tyler Robinson, is also reported to have been active on the site.

Roberts posted disturbing content that related to murder, violence, misogyny, weapons, and his intention to kill his mother.

He used multiple aliases on chat forums. His profiles had been flagged over his abusive and threatening content, including talking openly about killing his mother, described by relatives as having ‘a heart full of love and kindness’.

Roberts also had a fascination with serial killers, including TV series Dexter and movie American Psycho.

In the weeks running up to the murder, he used AI search tool Deepseek to ask for tips for a ‘non-experienced killer’, including whether he should use a knife or a hammer.

After it refused to engage, Roberts tricked it by lying that he was writing a book about serial killers.

Although he has never explained the killing of his doting mother, and answered ‘no comment’ throughout his police interviews, in messages before the murder, he said he was motivated by ‘hatred of women’.

Ms Shellis, a qualified teacher, had taken a teaching assistant post so she could spend more time at home with her two sons.

But in another message, Roberts wrote that he felt ‘abandoned, betrayed and bullied’ and blamed his mother.

He said that he was killing her for ‘revenge, justice, vengeance’ and so that he could move forward in his life.

In one chilling post about his mother, he wrote how he had ‘nearly traumatised myself’ by going into her bedroom while she slept with a hammer in his hand.

The teenager bought weapons, including knives, axes and hammers after turning 18, fewer than two weeks before killing his 45-year-old mother. 

Relatives knew that Roberts regularly carried a knife in his backpack, and his mum had become increasingly concerned by his behaviour.

On October 17 – four days after he had turned 18 – she messaged a social worker and friends, stating that he had bought a knife and a hammer, Mold Crown Court heard today.

She had sought support for her son on numerous occasions and was again expressing concern as to his mental health.

In one note on her phone, she asked: ‘Why?? What does he need these for?

‘Is he planning to hurt me, himself, what? Who? Why? FFS.’

Her older son was also concerned, and before going back to university, he had set up wireless-enabled cameras inside the family home so they could monitor Roberts.

In the early hours of October 18, Roberts posted messages on Discord stating that he had been standing over his mother holding a hammer when she was asleep, but did not use it.

The next morning, she wrote a note on her phone reading: ‘OMG… I did not sleep well at all… and Tristan kept coming into my room too – why?’

Another note read: ‘Am I safe in my room tonight?’

Her son put his murderous plan into practice after his older brother had gone back to university for the new term. 

The prosecutor said that on the evening of October 23, Roberts made a brief voice recording in which he said that he was going to kill his mother that night with a sledgehammer.

‘He said that he was ‘Alex’.

‘It is believed that he was in some way role-playing.’

He taped himself saying: ‘This is Tristan Roberts.

‘Tonight I’m going to be Alex and I’m going to murder my mother with a sledgehammer.’

A four-hour recording started around 11pm. It detailed an initial attack on the mother in her bedroom in which he attacked her to the head with a hammer and strangled her.

Shockingly, she was kept prisoner in her room for about four hours as her son brandished the weapon.

The recording captures Ms Shellis remaining calm, even saying she would ‘back him up and say that he had not known what he was doing’, prosecutor Andrew Thomas KC said.

He then cynically convinced her to leave the house under the pretence that she could have her injuries treated.

Instead he tricked her into taking a ‘short cut’ through a nature reserve where he took the sledgehammer out of his rucksack and began repeatedly attacking his screaming mother.

Roberts – whose previously long straight hair had been cut to a short crop before today’s hearing – cast his gaze downwards from his seat in the glass-panelled dock as the ‘catastrophic’ injuries he inflicted were spelt out.

But for most of the hearing, he looked straight ahead, displaying no sign of emotion.

At one stage today’s proceedings had to be briefly halted after a relative of Ms Shellis began sobbing uncontrollably.

Ring doorbell footage from a neighbouring house showed the mother and son leaving home on foot at 3.19am on the night of the murder.

The teenager returned to the semi-detached property alone at 5.35am before leaving again 50 minutes later, swinging a carrier bag thought to have contained bleach to clean the murder scene.

However, his plans were thwarted by the presence of early morning dog walkers, and he returned home again.

Here, he logged on to Discord and ‘boasted’ about the killing, referencing the terrible injuries he had just inflicted.

Shortly after 8.30am, police were called to the discovery of a woman’s body in undergrowth at the Morfa nature reserve.

There was a lengthy trail of blood along a nearby gravel path, for more than 100 metres.

A murder probe was launched, with a cordon set up around the scene, but for four hours, detectives didn’t know her name.

A crutch, black gloves and black bloodied balaclava were discovered.

Shortly after 1pm a family member of Ms Shellis called police, worried about her welfare after reports of the woman’s body being discovered.

Originally from North Wales, she had moved back from Bedfordshire three years earlier after divorcing the boys’ father, getting a job as a teaching assistant at Rhyl High School.

It emerged she had needed a crutch because of a recent knee injury, which meant she was temporarily off work.

Police arrested the teenager at the family home, where he had barricaded himself in his bedroom.

Roberts calmly asked officers: ‘Is the body you found my mother?’

Detectives later found CCTV footage showing the pair walking over a railway crossing towards the nature reserve with Roberts carrying a rucksack containing the murder weapon.

Police seized digital devices from his home – a laptop, voice recorder, and his mother’s mobile phone, which was hidden under a suitcase in a wardrobe.

The family had tried to phone Ms Shellis after becoming concerned about her whereabouts.

Posing as his mother, Roberts replied to messages from his brother saying she couldn’t speak as she had a ‘bad throat’.

The brother messaged: ‘Just call me for a second… so that I know you are alive.’

Roberts replied from his mother’s phone to which the defendant replied: ‘I think I am alive [laughing emoji]’.

The laptop examination showed his extensive use of Discord, including thousands of screenshots.

Roberts had made purchases on Amazon and at shops, including The Range, in preparation for the horrific killing.

Officers believe that his turning 18 was significant because the sales would become legal. His purchases included a balaclava, facemasks, overalls and clingfilm.

The murder weapon – a £20 ‘mini sledgehammer’ bought on Amazon – was seized at the family home.

A bloodstained water bottle in a carrier bag at the home had the mother’s DNA on.

Roberts was quizzed on nine occasions during four days after a mental health nurse deemed him fit for interview.

He answered ‘no comment’ to all questions and has never explained why he killed his mother.

He pleaded guilty to murder last month after a psychiatric report was discussed with him by his defence team in the cells.

A psychiatric report found ‘no credible evidence of any other form of mental disorder’ beyond his autism and ADHD.

‘His conditions did not impair his ability to understand his actions, form a rational judgment or exercise self-control at all, let alone substantially,’ it concluded.

Powerful victim impact statements were read in court by her sister, Sarah Gunther and surviving son Ethan.

He said their mother had done ‘everything’ for Tristan throughout his life, and had ‘put up with more than any mum should have’.

‘I don’t know how he could have done this to anyone, let alone the one person out of everybody who would do anything for him,’ he said.

‘She never gave up on him,’ he added, saying he felt Tristan had ‘manipulated’ professionals who tried to help.

In his statement – read on his behalf – Ethan said his brother’s crimes had ‘destroyed our family’.

He said he felt ‘haunted’ by anger over his mother’s killing as well as guilt that he was unable to protect her.

Ethan said he never wanted to see his brother again.

Reading hers in person, Ms Gunther said she wanted her sister to be remembered as ‘a mum who never gave up’.

She said Ms Shellis had been failed by agencies which should have helped the family and called for them to be held ‘accountable’, adding that it was a tragedy that ‘could have been avoided’.

Earlier, the court heard how Ms Shellis repeatedly tried to obtain support for her son, but with ‘limited success’.

‘Their relationship became strained,’ Mr Thomas said.

Roberts spent time in hospital and in homeless accommodation before living with his father in Milton Keynes. He returned to live with his mother in September 2025.

Roberts had a previous offence as a youngster for possessing a bladed article and wasn’t in education at the time of the killing. His older brother was away at university.

In mitigation, David Elias KC told the court that while his psychiatric state was no defence, his plan to murder his mother ‘must have been contributed to by his deteriorating mental health’.

He said Roberts had experienced a ‘traumatic childhood’.

Mr Elias asked Judge Rhys Rowlands to take into account his guilty plea and the fact that he had just turned 18 at the time of the killing.

A safeguarding review is likely to take place. 

Afterwards, Ms Shellis’s sister, Sarah Gunther, said the ‘devoted’ and ‘fiercely supportive’ mother had ‘fought tirelessly’ for Tristan and his brother.

She paid tribute to her as ‘a woman whose heart, strength, and spirit shaped the lives of everyone who knew her’.

Ms Gunther said: ‘She had so many amazing qualities, but one of the greatest was the way she devoted herself to her boys.

‘She was a fantastic and fiercely supportive mum, the kind who never gave up, no matter how hard life became.

‘She fought tirelessly for them, and her love for them was unbreakable, a source of strength that carried her and her boys through every challenge.

‘She will be missed every single day by so many people whose lives she touched.

‘But even though she is no longer with us in body, the love she gave and the memories she created will stay with us forever.

‘Her spirit lives on in the laughter she shared, the strength she showed, and the love she poured into her family.’

Senior investigating officer, Temporary Detective Superintendent Andrew Gibson said Ms Shellis ‘showed tremendous bravery on that fateful night’ and ‘remained calm and continued to show her caring nature and love she had for Tristan, despite what must have been a terrifying ordeal for her’.

He added: ‘It was important that Angela remained the focal point throughout the investigation, and I hope today’s sentencing allows for some closure and supports Angela’s family in moving forward and towards rebuilding their lives.’

Andrew Slight of the Crown Prosecution Service said: ‘The level of planning Tristan Roberts did ahead of committing this shocking crime was elaborate and calculated.

‘His mother’s final moments must have been terrifying, yet he showed no concern or remorse for his actions.

‘The strong evidence presented by the Crown Prosecution Service painted a clear picture, showing Roberts’s intentions, resulting in his guilty plea.

‘Although this case has concluded, our thoughts remain with the family and friends who still feel the terrible loss of Angela.’

It will be 30 years next year since Gracia Morton disappeared.

A devoted mother of one, the virtuoso violinist had everything to live for. And yet, since November 12 1997, not a trace of her has ever been found.

After she went missing police suspected foul play. The likely culprit? Her husband, Michael Morton, a wealthy, womanising architect who she was in the process of divorcing.

He always denied any wrongdoing but in 2005, after three police investigations and two trials, a jury at the Old Bailey sensationally found him guilty of killing Gracia, for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

But while the case was closed, it was far from fully solved.

Because to this day police have no idea how Morton killed the 40-year-old nor how he covered up the crime.

Morton was eventually jailed after police found CCTV of him strolling into Gracia’s home using her own front door keys. 

But when the investigation was launched, six years after she went missing, they had no forensic evidence and, crucially, no body – and not for want of trying.

Morton’s £1.5m Victorian townhouse in London’s fashionable Notting Hill was searched with sniffer dogs, its drains probed and patio lifted.

Gracia’s car, left outside her husband’s house with her phone inside, was forensically examined – as was his Renault estate car.

As for the couple’s honey-stoned country cottage in the Cotswold village of Stonesfield, detectives searched it from top to bottom, dug bore holes in its garden and probed possible burial sites in a local slate mine and nearby beauty spots.

But even though they found no sign of Gracia, in this quiet corner of England the search for her is far from forgotten.

Because, three decades on, the one person capable of solving the mystery of the missing mother still lives in their midst.

When the Daily Mail visited earlier this month, the now 88-year-old Morton was to be found making the most of the early Spring sunshine, happily pottering around the very same cottage where he was arrested back in 2003.

While somewhat a reclusive figure, villagers say he spends much of his time gardening, even occasionally inviting passers-by in off the street to admire his green-fingered efforts.

Indeed, the white-haired pensioner initially greeted our reporter with a chirpy ‘hello!’. But his warm welcome rapidly cooled as soon as Gracia’s name was mentioned.

Asked whether he will ever admit to killing his wife, he replied: ‘No. I don’t want to talk to you, no.’

When asked if he would ever reveal where the body was hidden, he put his fingers in his ears and began singing: ‘No, no. Nothing.’

He added: ‘I don’t want press reports. If I said one thing and you report that, might be good, might be bad. But I don’t want press reports anyway.’

When Morton later spotted the Daily Mail’s reporter speaking to neighbours, he emerged out of his cottage to walk to his wheelie bin. He questioned why Gracia’s death and his conviction was a ‘story’ – but again refused to comment on where the body is hidden.

He then proclaimed: ‘I am the hermit of Stonesfield. You are not going to find anything out talking to my neighbours because nobody knows me.’

His response does not surprise Hamish Campbell, the now retired Scotland Yard detective chief superintendent responsible for bringing Morton to some sort of justice.

He and his colleagues at the Met became all too familiar with the arrogance of the Cambridge-educated millionaire and self-proclaimed Marxist.

Morton once boasted to friends that he was ‘a genius, smarter than Darwin or Freud and certainly clever enough to outwit policemen.’

As he points out, if Morton really believed his wife was still alive, why hasn’t he made any effort since his release from prison to try to find her?

‘He’s a disgraceful man,’ Mr Campbell told the Daily Mail. ‘His response shows Morton at his worst. Dismissive, unconcerned, and if she is still alive, as he always suggested, he took no opportunity to appeal or state that he hopes she is out there listening.

‘He claims he was wholly uninvolved in her absence. Therefore, as a grieving, anxious husband, you’d think he would be adopting a more concerned approach – both as to Gracia’s whereabouts and for seeking answers for his daughter. But he never did and still does not.’

The belief is that Morton flew into a rage and killed Gracia over her desire to send their four-year-old daughter to private school, which he strongly opposed.

‘He has never admitted what he did,’ adds Mr Campbell. ‘His two properties were searched deeply. The third inquiry investigated Morton extensively, but there was no sign of Gracia.’

Police believe that architect Morton may have used his knowledge of building work to dispose of the body. Another possibility is that he dumped her in the Thames or a reservoir.

‘She was a very slight woman and Morton probably strangled her in a fit of rage,’ says Mr Campbell. ‘She may have been wrapped up. The car was clean. There was nothing to show she had been there.

‘Murderers will either hide bodies in their homes or dismember them and bury them somewhere in the house. Look at Fred and Rose West, for example. Or the killer will quickly get the body out of the property and dump them. That is what I think he did.’

Morton and Gracia Lezama, who was 19 years his junior, met in the mid 1980s while she was on holiday from Argentina.

Despite the age gap, at first glance he appeared to have much to offer.

The son of wealthy parents, Morton was privately educated before studying at Cambridge.

There, in an act of rebellion against his privileged upbringing, he declared himself a communist. Having qualified as an architect he worked for the Greater London Council, building fire stations until his father died and he inherited several million pounds.

With his new-found wealth, the heavy-drinking Morton started dating a string of women, placing small ads in The Guardian Soulmates column posing as a ‘Notting Hill Male who loves Marx and Mozart and is looking for love’.

Woman after woman fell for what one former lover described as his ‘magnetic charm’.

He married and divorced, going on to have five children with four different women, many later telling of the violence they suffered at his hands.

He and Gracia married in 1987 and the first cracks in their relationship showed soon after.

Morton taunted her, calling her ‘a failed Argie violinist’, with friends saying he also began to beat her. On one occasion he was said to have laughed when she was forced to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide her black eyes.

After a string of miscarriages, their daughter was born in 1993 – but the rows between the couple just got worse.

After meeting and falling in love with a local businessman, Gracia worked up the courage to leave Morton, moving into a Kensington flat and filing for divorce on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty.

This infuriated him – police later concluded that by leaving she was immediately in danger because Morton hated the woman to end a relationship.

He told one girlfriend: ‘You must never leave me. Women must never leave me … that’s when the trouble starts.’

On the day she disappeared, Wednesday November 12 1997, the decree nisi was imminent.

She drove to her husband’s house, leaving her breakfast half eaten, her bed unmade and her passport in its usual place at her Kensington flat.

Morton later told police they had argued over her choice of a private school for their daughter.

He claimed she had given him the keys to her flat and car and had then departed – admitting being the last person to see his wife, but saying she left fit and well.

Putting on a bravura act as the distraught husband, Morton reported Gracia missing.

But suspicions were quickly raised by his strange behaviour.

On the Friday night, Gracia’s sister visited from Birmingham, spotting a carpet in the back of Morton’s car.

‘It was just fleeting though’, she later told the Old Bailey of her glimpse of his boot.

Days after the disappearance Morton broke down crying, saying: ‘She’s dead, she’s dead.’

He even built a ‘shrine’ to her at his house, prompting the first search of the property.

But although he was arrested three times, he was not charged with any offence until a third inquiry team reviewed the case in 2003.

They discovered CCTV footage from Gracia’s flat which showed her husband entering the building the day after she disappeared.

He had previously denied knowing where the flat was, let alone visiting it.

Recalling that breakthrough Mr Campbell told the Daily Mail how he had tasked a team of detectives to look back over the past investigations.

‘It was that team that discovered the original CCTV evidence had not been examined as stated,’ he said. ‘This was the error. That undid Morton, since in the interviews I had held with him in 1998, he was adamant he had never been to the house before. And his lies were clear.’

He added: ‘Morton was an arrogant bully. A pompous and arrogant man who always believed he was right. In an interview I remember his solicitor advised him: ‘Don’t speak to Campbell’.

‘But he did. That was his downfall. He thought: ‘I’m better than the Old Bill’.

‘Instead of saying nothing he would say: ‘I need to answer’.

‘So when we presented him with the CCTV evidence that showed he was lying, that’s when he started saying ‘No comment’. That’s when we knew we had him’.

As well as the row over schooling, Mr Campbell believes the fact Gracia was leaving him was critical.

‘There are studies that show it is the closure and ending of relationships with violent, abusive men, that can be a trigger for violence against women,’ he said. ‘He killed her just as she was about to move on with her life.

She had found happiness with a new partner. She had a young daughter.’

Morton was finally jailed in 2005. His first trial in 2004 had ended with a hung jury.

In the re-trial he was convicted of manslaughter but cleared of murder – verdicts that ‘shocked’ Mr Campbell. He says he and his team ‘all believed it was murder’.

As for Morton himself, residents in Stonesfield say they are aware of his past.

They said that upon being released from prison in 2012, Morton returned to his cottage and attempted to integrate himself back into the community. Yet signs of his hair-trigger temper were there for all to see.

As one villager told the Mail: ‘After he came out of prison he wanted to get himself back into the village community and wanted to become a library volunteer. But he was told he was not going to be able to serve as a volunteer because he wouldn’t pass the DBS check. He got angry and jumped up, knocking his chair backwards, and left the meeting. Everyone at the meeting witnessed this.’

Another told how some in the village refer to him as ‘the murderer’ – despite his acquittal on that charge.

‘He is odd,’ said one resident. ‘You hardly see him about at all. Sometimes you see him walking around, limping. It’s the same cottage that was dug up at the time.

‘He’s known around here as “the murderer”. That’s what we call him.’

A third added: ‘He is quite abrasive. People’s interactions with him are usually some kind of dispute in some shape or form. I don’t know if there is any malice in it, it is just his general demeanour.’

So it is that Morton, continues to go about his day-to-day business, enjoying the retirement he so cruelly denied to his wife.

All the time continuing to deny her family – and his child – the closure of knowing what actually happened to her all those years ago.

A groundworker who confessed to burying a mother in a shallow grave is filmed by police bodycam pointing out the deposition site – five weeks after officers failed to find her hidden under a mattress in his home.

A court heard cocaine addict Mohammed Durnion’s neighbour had dialled 999 after hearing a woman ‘screaming in fear’ inside his flat last May.

But although police arrived 12 minutes after the call, officers who searched the property in Coventry, West Midlands, failed to find mother-of-two Reanne Coulson, 33.

The ‘powerfully-built’ Muslim convert had stashed 5ft 1in Ms Coulson’s ‘dead or dying’ body in a duvet hidden beneath a mattress in the squalid property after killing her while high on cocaine.

Giovanni D’Alessandro from the Crown Prosecution Service said: ‘This was an act that cruelly cut short the life of an innocent woman

‘Mohammed Durnion killed Reanne and then tried to dispose of her body to escape justice and Adam Moore helped him do it. At no point did either of them show remorse or take accountability for what they had done. Instead, they forced Reanne’s family to sit through a trial and relive every detail of what happened to her.

‘The Crown Prosecution Service worked closely with police to build a compelling case, including CCTV, phone records, witness testimony, and forensic evidence, that left the jury in no doubt of both defendants’ guilt. Our thoughts are with Reanne’s family who have shown immense courage and dignity throughout this process. We hope today’s verdicts bring some sense of justice to them.’

In the footage released by police following Durnion’s conviction for manslaughter today, the handcuffed killer is seen gesturing to officers who had asked where he had buried Ms Coulson as he replies: ‘she is under there’ and saying the body is ‘deep enough’.

An officer then asks him: ‘Is she wrapped in anything?’ and Durnion replies ‘No, no, no no’.

He is then asked what he used to bury her, before agreeing that it was a shovel.

Bodycam footage of the moment a panting Durnion answers his front door to police, telling officers, ‘I’ve had a really rough day… please leave me alone,’ on May 21 was also released by West Midlands Police today.

A third clip of police searching the address by mobile phone torchlight – because Durnion’s landlord had the electricity switched off over his failure to pay rent – was also published by the force, which said a review of the search process had identified ‘opportunities for learning’.

Durnion, 42, was cleared of murder by a jury at Warwick Crown Court but convicted of manslaughter by a majority of 11-1. 

His co-defendant Adam Moore was convicted of assisting an offender by the same majority of 11-1.

They will be sentenced on Thursday. 

Judge Kristina Montgomery KC thanked the jury for dealing with the evidence ‘as calmy and as carefully as you plainly have’.  

Jurors were told former company director Durnion became distressed on June 27 and told officers he would take them to the burial site at Binley Woods, on the outskirts of Coventry.

By then, officers were already searching the woodland after Durnion and fellow groundworker Moore, 39, had transported her to the woods in a suitcase by car – only realising when they arrived that her phone was amongst her belongings and still transmitting a signal.

Ms Coulson’s body was set alight with petrol before being buried in an attempt to destroy forensic evidence, and possibly even her identity, the court heard.

Durnion then drove away with her phone, throwing it out of his car window, at which point the signal deactivated.

But police were able to link the handset to the journey taken by the vehicle from Durnion’s flat to the woods in the early hours of May 22.

The trial heard once-married Durnion had attacked Ms Coulson, a sex worker who was known to take drugs, within a minute of shepherding her into his flat. 

He had chanced upon Ms Coulson after she had visited a church foodbank that night.

At 11.26pm, almost two hours after Ms Coulson was filmed on CCTV leaving the foodbank, a neighbour dialled 999 and reported hearing a woman ‘screaming in fear’.

When police arrived 12 minutes later, the flat was quiet and littered with rubbish and pet faeces – Durnion had at one point been looking after a dog.  Police believe he had also been using a bucket as a toilet at one stage.

A ‘sweating and agitated’ Durnion initially refused entry without a warrant, then faked a mental health crisis – telling officers he was having a schizophrenic episode before eventually running away into the night – leaving police to search the cluttered property.

He was later seen smirking by a witness while carrying the suitcase he had used to move the body, and went on a drugs binge before his arrest.

Detective Inspector Nigel Box told the Daily Mail: ‘He covered her up in the duvet and he pulled a mattress on top of her, which, given the state of the place, didn’t look out of place. So sadly, Reanne wasn’t found during that initial search.’

Once officers had left the address, Durnion returned and within hours had moved the body. 

Ms Coulson’s remains were found after Durnion, in his police interview, was played an emotional media appeal by her family for information over her disappearance.  

Durnion told the court that since his relationship with his wife broke down he started to use cocaine heavily, which affected his behaviour.

Associates told police that he became volatile and unpredictable when using the drug.

A post mortem examination found the cause of death was unascertained. 

The post mortem examination found head and neck injuries, including bruising, were inflicted on Ms Coulson while she was alive, while burn injuries to her face and side were caused after death, ‘as if someone had tried to destroy that part of her body, or maybe her identity’, prosecutor Timothy Cray KC said.

Jurors were told that Durnion agreed he was the last person to see Ms Coulson alive and also accepted he buried her body in the woods.

During his trial opening, Mr Cray said: ‘His case… is that he picked up Reanne that Wednesday evening and gave her money to buy drugs.

‘He picked her up believing she was a sex worker but says that there was no sexual contact between them that night.’

Mr Cray added: ‘We say that the timing and circumstances suggest that this was a deliberate attack by a powerfully-built man, on a vulnerable and defenceless woman who he had taken back to his address.

‘One of the circumstances to look at is how long they had been together in the flat. The evidence is that the attack began within a minute of the defendant arriving at the flat around 11.22pm.

‘Is that really long enough to take drugs, get high, start arguing and overdose, or is that timing consistent with some sort of sudden, fatal attack?

‘When the police arrived… Reanne was nowhere to be seen or heard. This was because by then it must be that Reanne was incapable of calling for help.

‘She was dead or dying because of Mohammed Durnion’s attack.’

Durnion denied killing Ms Coulson, falsely claiming she died from a drug overdose during an argument at his flat. 

The jury took just over ten hours to convict Durnion and Moore, of Willenhall, Coventry. He had denied assisting an offender on May 22 by helping dispose of Ms Coulson’s body, claiming he attended the woods simply to look for Durnion.

DI Box said: ‘It was ultimately the family’s appeals that were played to him at the end of the interview process that I think convinced (Durnion) to do, in his mind, the right thing and take us to the body of Reanne’. 

He described the case as ‘shocking and appalling’ and said Ms Coulson’s family were ‘absolutely heartbroken and devastated by what’s happened to her’.

The senior investigating officer added: ‘We have been supporting her family throughout this investigation and throughout the trial at court.

‘They’ve heard some really harrowing evidence about what’s happened to her body when taken to Binley Woods and we hope that the results at court will go some way to giving them a sense of justice, at least.’

West Midlands Police said: ‘A review of the circumstances around the search of the premises was carried out by our Professional Standards Department. No misconduct was identified although some opportunities for learning were identified and implemented.

‘We informed Reanne’s family of the review and expressed our regret we were not able to find her on the 21 May. We have liaised with Reanne’s family throughout the investigation into her death.’

Giovanni D’Alessandro from the Crown Prosecution Service said: ‘This was an act that cruelly cut short the life of an innocent woman 

‘Mohammed Durnion killed Reanne and then tried to dispose of her body to escape justice and Adam Moore helped him do it. 

‘At no point did either of them show remorse or take accountability for what they had done. Instead, they forced Reanne’s family to sit through a trial and relive every detail of what happened to her.’

Durnion was born Alan Durnion in Coventry, but moved to Dorset with his family as a child.  He is thought to have converted around 20 years ago. 

His mother and sister declined to comment when approached by the Mail.

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By JOHN SIDDLE

Published: 20:50 EDT, 23 March 2026 | Updated: 04:57 EDT, 24 March 2026