Teen accused of mutilating corpse admits kicking in door of tomb
But Sonny Devlin, 17, denied removing the head from a corpse and then playing with it.
Devlin, from Edinburgh, and another 15-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, both deny “violation of a sepulchre”.
It is alleged that on June 30, 2003, they forced open the entrance to the Mackenzie Mausoleum in the cemetery.
They are accused of pulling out a body from a coffin in the lower level tomb and cutting off the head with a knife. They are then alleged to have played with the head, simulated a sex act with it and then discarded it.
Devlin told the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday he only entered the mausoleum in a bid to play a practical joke on his co-accused. He said he and another friend had wanted to frighten the unnamed teenager by attempting to trap him in the tomb.
Devlin, who admitted having drunk a bottle of tonic wine and half a bottle of cider prior to the event, said he and his co-accused went up to the tomb, whereupon he “kicked the door in”.
The 15-year-old then went further into the tomb, while he (Devlin) remained nearer the entrance, he claimed. When the younger of the two emerged he came running back “with something in his hands”, the court heard. Devlin said: “It (the head) got thrown to me and I looked at it and freaked a wee bit and threw it back and it hit the floor.”
Devlin also told the court he had spoken to a group of “goths” before he went to the tomb, and they were carrying “sealed bags of body remains”.
A 15-year-old female witness, who also cannot be identified, earlier told the court that Devlin had pretended to perform a sex act on a head which had been removed from a body in a tomb. The girl also claimed that Devlin was “chucking the head around”.
The witness, the girlfriend of one of the accused, told the court that a member of a group of “goths” had said to her group of friends, “Do you want to go and get the head of George Mackenzie?”
She said that Sonny agreed and he and the other accused went up the hill towards the mausoleum.
The witness said: “Twenty minutes to half an hour later they were running down the hill and Sonny had a blanket in his hand all bundled up.
“He just dropped it and the head rolled out. He (Devlin) was pretending it was giving him a blow job.”
The witness burst into tears when she was shown a photograph of the severed head.
Devlin later bragged about what he had done, the witness claimed.
The trial is believed to be the first of its kind for more than 100 years.
George “Bloody” Mackenzie, after whom the mausoleum was named, was King’s Advocate for Charles II and was laid to rest in 1691. The identity of the body in question is not known.
