Sexual fantasist gets life sentence for murder

A MUSICIAN who murdered a British teacher to fulfil a “bizarre and macabre” sexual fantasy was yesterday jailed for life.

Sexual deviant Graham Coutts, 35, was found guilty of strangling Jane Longhurst to death with a pair of tights while fulfilling his “sordid and evil” obsession with necrophilia and asphyxial sex.

Lewes Crown Court found him guilty of murdering the 31-year-old teacher and Judge Richard Brown ordered that he must serve a minimum of 30 years. He said to Coutts: “Everything that this court has heard about Jane Longhurst shows her to have been the sort of person whose life enriched all those who came into contact with her.

“In seeking perverted sexual gratification by way of your sordid and evil fantasies, you have taken her life and devastated the lives of those she loved and of those who loved her.

“By persisting in your denials, you have put those loved ones through the ordeal of this courtroom and have forced them to relive the last moments of her life and the unbelievable degradation of her body. You have shown not one jot of remorse.” Members of Miss Longhurst’s family shouted “yes”, and “pervert” and “pig”, as the defendant was taken down to begin his sentence.

Coutts attacked Miss Longhurst, 31, a talented viola player and popular special needs teacher, at his ground floor flat following a chance phone call on her day off. She called to have a chat with Coutts’s pregnant girlfriend Lisa Stephens, 37, but ended up agreeing to meet the defendant for a swim, prosecutor John Kelsey-Fry QC told the court on the opening day of the trial.

Coutts persuaded her to go back to his flat where he strangled her with a pair of nylon tights, which were later found embedded in her neck.

As he killed her, he “had his way with her”, satisfying a “bizarre and macabre” lifelong desire to rape, strangle and kill a woman.

Coutts, who confessed to having a fetish for women’s necks, then placed the body in the foetal position in a cardboard box, which he kept in the garden shed for 11 days.

Worried Miss Stephens might find his “trophy”, Coutts used a false name to hire a five foot-wide storage unit in Brighton, where he kept Miss Longhurst’s body, visiting it 10 times.

On April 18 the smell of the decomposing corpse, which had been detected by staff at the Big Yellow Storage Company, forced Coutts to move Miss Longhurst.

The following day he drove the body to an RSPB bird sanctuary on Wiggonholt Common, near Pulborough, West Sussex, where he set it alight with petrol.

The trial heard that Coutts had surfed the Internet for violent images of strangled dead women on gruesome websites featuring necrophilia, asphyxiation and rape during a seven-year addiction to pornography.

Records taken from his computer revealed he used the web to fuel his fantasy on the day before Miss Longhurst was murdered, and again after he had burnt her body.

Workers at the Big Yellow Storage Company provided the vital evidence in the hunt for the music teacher’s killer.

They told police there had been a bad smell at the company in Coombe Road, which had vanished shortly after Coutts, posing as Paul Kelly, had removed a package.

Detectives searched unit C50 rented by Coutts and found a catalogue of damning evidence.

Inside a box was a condom with Coutts’s semen on the inside and on which was found Miss Longhurst’s DNA. Also found were her clothes, swimming costume, mobile phone and purse, together with a petrol can.

Coutts was arrested on April 25. Six months later he invented an extraordinary defence, claiming Miss Longhurst had consented to asphyxial sex on March 14 after falling into his arms.