A lifelong dream to strangle, rape and murder

THE jury which convicted Graham Coutts accepted the shocking reality that he acted out on the helpless Jane Longhurst his lifelong fantasy of strangling, raping and killing a woman.

What they were never told was that Coutts made a grim and terrifying prediction that he would, one day, actually carry out such an appalling crime.

The horrifying warning, given to former lover Sandra Gates in the 1980s, was ruled inadmissible during lengthy legal argument before the trial began.

Judge Richard Brown decided the chilling remarks were too old to be properly relied upon, and other secrets were also out of date.

But it is clear Coutts, a drifter and dangerous sexual deviant who failed to make it as a professional musician, had a burning desire that would one day be played out on the unsuspecting Miss Longhurst, 31.

It can also now be revealed the talented viola player ironically described Coutts as "unstable", although many who met him on the pub gig scene in Brighton described him as quiet and inoffensive.

For Sandra Gates, one of Coutts's sexual partners who consented to asphyxial sex in the name of love, his warning that he may be unable to control his perverse fantasy gave her an insight into his mind few else had.

She told police he said to her during their relationship: "I get the most awful feelings that I am going to strangle, kill and rape a woman."

Ms Gates also told police that during the same period she discovered pornographic photos of naked women in Coutts's home. Around the neck of each girl Coutts had hand-drawn a hangman's noose yet another frightening sign of the murderer's obsession with dead women.

Coutts, born in 1968 in Leven, in the Fife area of Scotland, never excelled academically and tried to cultivate his dream career as a professional guitarist.

But music was not the only interest that gripped the young Coutts. He confessed that he developed an unnatural fetish for women's necks at the tender age of 15, and by the age of 21 he was practicing asphyxial sex, or as he called it "breath control sex".