‘Shauna had nothing to do with it,’ Nathan said firmly. ‘The reason I told the lies in the beginning was because of everybody else I wanted to protect.’
Breaking down in tears, he added, ‘I couldn’t think of a way of being able to actually, effectively protect them, as in them believing she was off somewhere, getting messages from her saying she was fine, she was happy, that kind of thing. Obviously, because I couldn’t do that they deserved to know the truth, have a burial, be able to say goodbye.’
The courtroom was silent apart from the sound of Anjie and Sarah sobbing. It made my skin crawl that he was pretending to care about whether we had a burial or not. If he cared one iota about that, he wouldn’t have chopped up her body.
Mr Mousley narrowed his eyes and asked, ‘Do you agree it sounds ridiculous that Shauna had no idea what was going on?’
Nathan replied, ‘I wouldn’t say ridiculous, no. I can understand suspicion of things but what happened, happened.’
Nathan said that he had planned to tie Becky to a tree and scare her after he had kidnapped her.
William looked at him incredulously. ‘And what was going to happen after you finished terrifying her?’ he asked.
‘I would have let her go, after warning her to behave,’ Nathan replied.
‘She had been bound, gagged, handcuffed, tied to a tree and terrorised – and you thought she would have just walked off and lived her life? Did you live in a fantasy world in February this year?’
Nathan looked up at him before he replied, ‘I didn’t live in a fantasy world.’
Then William began to really grill Nathan, asking, ‘Did your attitude towards Becky change after you killed her?’
‘I didn’t have an attitude to her,’ Nathan replied.
‘What about how you treated her after she died?’ William asked.
‘That’s got nothing to do with how I felt about her,’ Nathan muttered.
William glared at him. ‘What about stabbing her fifteen times with a knife?’
Nathan looked at the floor. ‘That’s nothing to do with how I felt about her.’
‘What about cutting her up into pieces?’ William demanded.
Beside me, Anjie started to tremble.
Nathan simply replied, ‘Like I said, I did what I had to do.’
William paused before quietly asking, ‘Did you take pleasure in what you did?’
Tearfully, Nathan answered, ‘No.’
The next day in court, Nathan continued his evidence. William started to ramp up his questioning, the disdain dripping from his voice as he addressed him.
He asked if he was lying about having a mask on, to help his story that this was a prank that went wrong. Nathan shook his head.
‘No, because then there would have been a massive struggle. The whole point was for her not to know it was me,’ he replied.
‘You didn’t have a disguise, she clearly knew who you were … It was all rather pathetic what you were doing – and you killed her,’ William accused.
Matthews sniffed as he replied, ‘No, it was doing a drastic thing to have a good end result.’
My stomach knotted at the words ‘good end result’. I had no idea that my stepson had such a twisted mind. I stared at him, feeling nothing but contempt and bitterness towards him.
Nathan began crying in the witness box, with his head on the table, as William continued to question him sharply.
‘She was putting up too much of a fight for your liking, wasn’t she?’ he asked.
Nathan shook his head again. ‘There was no liking in it – it wasn’t like the way you are trying to paint it. There wasn’t a massive struggle.’
William went on, not giving any ground. ‘Was she fighting for her life?’
‘Not for her life, no,’ Nathan replied.
William then asked if Nathan was prepared to look at the computer-generated images of injuries to Becky’s head and face.
Nathan said no.
‘I didn’t think you would be,’ William snapped. He then looked up to where we were sitting, his expression softening slightly.
‘Have you ever expressed any remorse or sorrow to Becky or her family about what you did to her?’ he asked. Nathan shifted uncomfortably.
‘Not directly, no,’ he said, ‘I haven’t tried to contact any of them.’
‘Or do you feel sorry for yourself?’ William suggested.
‘I feel sorry for myself,’ Nathan replied. ‘But I feel sorry for everybody.’
Nathan said that he wasn’t entirely surprised when he was arrested, and he just kept saying how his plan had gone ‘horribly wrong’. William continued to press him on Shauna’s involvement in the crime, but Nathan was adamant that she’d had nothing to do with it. He even claimed that he managed to cut up Becky’s body with just one hand, which was obviously absurd. He then explained how he carefully packaged up the body parts, even storing some of them in the freezer. I felt a huge wave of nausea, and I looked up to see Sarah leaving the court. I couldn’t believe I had allowed Nathan to be a part of my family. I didn’t recognise him any more. Maybe I had never truly known him at all.
Shauna’s questioning began the next day, Friday 30 October. Anjie stayed at home while Sarah came with me. She was gunning for Shauna in particular. She was determined that just because the emphasis had been on Nathan so far, Shauna should not get off scot-free.
She looked a lot more confident than Nathan as she made her way over to the witness box. She was wearing a peach blouse, black jacket and some smart black trousers. I hoped that the jury wouldn’t be fooled by her act. The court was told that Shauna had grown up in care, only moving to Bristol to be with her mum when she was thirteen. Once again, she played the innocent card, claiming that Nathan controlled everything she did. She said that he once tried to strangle her, and once stabbed himself in the face with a fork during a row. When asked about Anjie, Shauna’s face softened.
‘She is amazing, very kind – cares for everybody,’ she said quietly. ‘As her health declined she still did what she could for anybody – that was the way she was. I was always taken on family holidays, invited over for Christmas and to celebrate my birthday.’
‘And you paid us back by helping to kill my daughter,’ I muttered to myself as Sarah reached for my hand. Shauna was nasty and scheming, as far as I was concerned. I prayed that the jury would see through her and that she wasn’t going to be able to wriggle out of the charges against her.
Her defence barrister, Andrew Langdon, asked her about the multiple ‘kidnap’ messages exchanged between her and Nathan, and she admitted that, initially, she had lied to the police about them.
‘I knew what Nathan had been charged with, I knew what had happened, I knew how bad it looked,’ she said. ‘It was meant sarcastically. I have a very sarcastic nature. It wasn’t an actual idea. I regret it massively.’
Andrew then started asking Shauna about the day Becky was killed. Shauna explained that she arrived at the house and went into the kitchen to find one of Anjie’s cigarettes, then she went for a smoke outside in the back garden. She could hear Becky’s music playing upstairs, and when she came back into the kitchen she thought she heard Becky leave the house. She said that later that evening, they went home and ate pizza and watched films before they went to bed.
The next day, the couple drove back to our home. She mentioned that Nathan had left at some point during the day, saying that he had to go and help a friend. Anjie started to become worried about Becky being missing, so Shauna put a post on Facebook to help locate her. She later noticed that Nathan had a scratch on his wrist, but she did not ask him about it. That night, Nathan told her that she couldn’t use the bathroom because the toilet was blocked and he needed to fix it. She didn’t quiz him when she heard the power saw because she thought it was just a boring job that he needed to get on with. When asked why they were caught on CCTV buying cleaning products, she said that she thought Nathan wanted to clean up their cluttered home
. She said that she did not help Nathan with the packing and bagging of Becky’s body or with cleaning up the bathroom, and she had never touched the two facemasks found in her house.
I went home that night ranting at what, to me, was an obvious pack of lies from start to finish. How could she possibly have ignored the sounds coming from the bathroom? There was no way Nathan could have dismembered Becky all on his own. I just didn’t believe it. I wondered if Nathan had any more injuries than just a scratch on his wrist. I hoped that some of Becky’s frantic punches as she fought for her life had connected. I hoped that she had hurt him, and not just got those bruises I’d seen on her fists from hitting out wildly and striking the doorframe or the wall. I kept going over all I’d heard about her final struggle, and the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Shauna must have helped to subdue Becky. My daughter was only little, but she knew how to punch properly.
On the next day of the trial, 2 November, Shauna was cross-examined by William Mousely. He asked her if she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She answered clearly and confidently, saying, ‘I didn’t believe I was in the wrong place. I was in my house, which is the normal place to be.’
‘Is it just an unhappy coincidence that you and Nathan were talking about kidnapping a teenage girl?’ William asked.
Shauna nodded. ‘It is just extremely unfortunate.’
‘You were in blissful ignorance of everything that had taken place?’ William asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Shauna also said that it was a coincidence she had made an Internet search for ‘Do You Want to Hide a Body?’ on the day Becky died, claiming she only played Nathan the video to make him laugh.
‘It was just a coincidence that Becky was lying dead in the bath a few feet away?’ William said incredulously.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
Sarah was leaning forward in her seat now, her knees shaking with the anger that filled her whole body. Her eyes were locked on Shauna, and she looked as though she was going to pounce and attack her. Our roles were suddenly reversed: now it was me trying to calm her down. She half stood up, and I had to pull her back onto her seat as Ziggy and Jo looked over anxiously.
Shauna kept insisting her version of events was true. She seemed very composed compared to the blubbering mess Nathan had been. I didn’t believe a second of it. I knew in my heart that she had been involved. She was cleverer and much more calculating than Nathan, although she was seven years his junior. I prayed that the jury would be able to see that.
‘It might seem slightly unlikely to people but it is completely plausible,’ she told the court.
William started to fire questions at her then: ‘Isn’t it the case that you and Nathan were in this together from start to finish?’
‘No,’ she replied instantly.
‘That you went there together with the clear intention of taking her away to use for your purposes, in which you were both so interested?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘You thought you could get away with it, didn’t you?’ William demanded.
Shauna frowned a little. ‘I didn’t have anything to get away with,’ she said.
‘But in the end there were just too many bits of evidence against you?’ William asked.
Shauna once again said no.
‘Are you just very unlucky?’ William asked sarcastically.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
Sarah gripped the barrier in front of us so hard her knuckles turned white. Luckily, the court then adjourned for the day so she could calm down. None of us believed Shauna’s story, but she hadn’t slipped once in answering William’s questions. She was cool and collected, as if something like this happened to her every day. There was no remorse. She didn’t once say she felt sorry that Becky was dead, and I wanted to kill her for that alone. Why should she have a life when my beautiful daughter had been robbed of hers?
Over the next two days, James Ireland and Donovan Demetrius were called to the witness box. James maintained that he did not know what was in the cases when he was asked by Karl Demetrius to help move them. He said that if he had known the vile truth, he would never have agreed to help. Donovan claimed that he was not involved at all. He said that he had simply been staying at his brother Karl’s house at the time Karl agreed to store the boxes for Nathan. In an emotional speech, he denied playing any part in hiding Becky’s body and said he was ‘horrified’ by what his brother had done.
‘Why would he put himself in that position?’ he asked, looking across at us. ‘Who in their right mind would do something so animalistic? My heart goes out to her family. I couldn’t believe that man, Nathan Matthews, could do such a horrible thing. Who in their right mind would dismember their own stepsister? It is sickening.’
His words drew cheers and claps from people in the court, as they summed up what so many of us were thinking.
William delivered his closing speech for the prosecution on Thursday, 5 November. I sat down with my family around me once more, but Anjie stayed at home. She needed to build up all the strength she could muster, so she could be in court for the verdict.
My heart was beating about a thousand times a minute when William turned to face the jury. I willed them to listen hard and hear the truth in his words.
‘This is a case where you have heard about two worlds: the fantasy world lived in by the defendants, and the real world where you and I live,’ he said. ‘Our world of good sense, and logic, where obvious and safe conclusions can be drawn from the evidence. Their world where people ignore the natural consequences of their actions. That world where complicated theories and suggestions that fly in the face of everything which is sensible take precedence. That world where when lies are told, they are all innocent lies; and that fantasy world where nobody tells anyone else what they have done, and nobody displays any emotions.
He then spoke about Becky, calling her a ‘not untypical teenage girl, putting the problems of the past behind her, with a long life to look forward to’. He looked over at me and added: ‘Clashing sometimes with her dad and her stepmother, a girl whose life was cruelly, and we submit callously, taken away from her at the hands of Nathan Matthews and Shauna Hoare. Because they didn’t like her, and because they thought she could be their sexual plaything. Not satisfied with that, the contempt they have for her extended to the grotesque way in which her body was treated after her death.’
He described Shauna as a cool customer, who had undoubtedly played a part in Becky’s murder. ‘Did she strike you as the downtrodden girl in fear of Nathan Matthews, or was she a confident, calculating woman who appeared older than her twenty-one years? She was hardly the little girl lost – and not a flicker of emotion the whole time she was in the witness box. A very cool, very cold individual. Hardly, if any, indication of remorse.
‘Becky was not going to go quietly – why on earth would she? She would fight, she would struggle, she would resist. It would take a lot of force to take her away. How do you improve your chances of doing that quickly and effectively? I suppose if it is two against one, it is easier, isn’t it?
‘And I suppose if you are both involved you have not got to hide from each other. Of course, in the fantasy world of Shauna Hoare she did not see or hear anything – she was in blissful ignorance.
‘It is quite clear that Shauna Hoare was complicit in the murder of Becky Watts.’
William then described Shauna as Lady Macbeth, quoting the famous play and telling the jury, ‘Be like an innocent flower, but a serpent beneath it.’
Turning his attention to Nathan, William pointed out that he had lied and lied again to cover up what happened to Becky. He questioned whether his manslaughter plea had been an attempt by him to exonerate Shauna out of loyalty and affection.
He asked the jury, ‘What has been his purpose in this trial? Has it been to tell you what really happened? Or has it been to try to get away with mu
rder?
‘If it is possible to see that scene in your mind’s eye, might it not see the determination that it would have taken so far as Nathan Matthews is concerned, and the sort of hatred required to do it. When you suffocate someone you have only one intention, and that is to kill.
‘If this was a terrible accident, what would you have expected him to do? Might he have raised the alarm? Might he have himself made an attempt or an effort to save Becky? Might he have made some attempt to resuscitate or something like that, to call 999, to call for help?’
William shook his head before glancing at the defendants’ dock.
‘No. What he did, and what he thought of, was having put his hands around her neck and having stopped her moving, he then took her pulse and that confirmed she was dead. That suggests someone who is making sure he has achieved what he wanted to.
‘He is racked with self-pity for the situation he finds himself in. There is a complete absence of sorrow for what he did to her, not a whiff of it. All he can bring himself to say is that he was worried how it might affect Anjie and Darren, worried for them, upset for them, and that he wanted to protect them.’
I felt like my heart might burst out of my chest at that moment, and I realised that I had been holding my breath. Although it was hard to bear, I was deeply impressed by how well William had put it. Surely anyone in their right mind would believe his version of events?
In his closing speech, Nathan’s barrister, Adam Vaitilingam, urged the jury to put their emotions to one side when considering a verdict. It was obvious that he was clutching at straws. He said the plot to kidnap Becky was boneheaded, extreme and absurd. He reminded the jury that Nathan was highly upset when he attacked Becky, and that she had fought back, causing the plan to go wrong. He said that Nathan had no intention of killing Becky, but recognised that he had treated her body with a lack of compassion and humanity.
‘I do not ask for sympathy for Nathan Matthews,’ he said. ‘He deserves none.’
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