Mother kills partner and child in vampire delusion

A mother in London who killed her partner and their four-year-old daughter to “prevent the world being taken over by vampires” has been locked up indefinitely in a secure mental hospital.

Shelley Christopher, 36, was suffering from psychotic illness when she stabbed 42-year-old Richard Brown 29 times and daughter Sophia six times.

She also throttled and repeatedly stabbed a second child, who was lucky to survive the attack on February 19.

Christopher then inserted a broken paint brush and pencils in the chest cavities of her victims in a crazed belief they might turn into vampires after death, jurors were told.

Police were alerted by social services on February 26 after Christopher took the other, injured child to St Mary’s Hospital.

The following day, officers went to Christopher’s flat in Notting Hill, west London, where they found Brown’s body in a bath filled with bloodied water.

Sophia was found lying in bed with a blood-stained towel covering her face. The girl’s chest had been covered with coloured sticking plasters and a plastic flower had been placed in her right hand.

After her arrest, Christopher told a psychiatrist the colours red, orange, and green had become significant to her, with red meaning that she or someone in her family was going to be killed.

On February 19, she said she had received an “orange signal instructing her to kill” in order to prevent the world being taken over by vampires.

First, she attacked the surviving child, by strangling and then stabbing her with a plastic flower and a small knife.

When Brown arrived with Sophia and asked what was going on, Christopher said: “You’re one of them. You’re a vampire,” and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest.

She told the psychiatrist that at the time his eyes had changed colour and he was trying to bite her with his fangs.

Sophia cried out “No mummy!” and when Christopher asked if she was “one of them”, the girl, according to Christopher, replied: “Yes, I am mummy,” so she stabbed her too, according to her account.

Prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC told jurors that Christopher had believed the signal to kill had come from a light bulb on the ceiling.

He said: “After she had attacked each of them with a knife, the light bulb had told her to put something wooden in to each of their chests in order to stop them from becoming vampires.

“From Richard’s chest cavity, the pathologist recovered part of a child’s paint brush. The pathologist who examined Sophia’s body retrieved part of a pencil,” he said.

When surgeons operated on the surviving girl, they removed a 6.5cm broken pencil from the child’s pus-filled chest cavity.

Two days before the killings, Christopher, of Colville Square, went to a Mental Health Unit in north Kensington where she told staff that someone was “out to get” her.

She had left the unit at St Charles Hospital before her assessment was complete because she thought there were vampires there, the court heard.

A psychiatrist has since concluded that Christopher, who is now in a secure mental hospital, had been suffering from a psychotic illness, most probably paranoid schizophrenia, when she killed her partner and child.

Aylett told jurors that, in the unusual circumstances of the case, it was for them rather than a judge or psychiatrist to decide on the evidence.

Following the one-day trial at the Old Bailey, Christopher was found not guilty of two counts of murder and one attempted murder by reason of insanity.

Christopher stood in the dock impassively as the verdict was returned after less than 10 minutes of deliberations.