Football coach gets life sentence for murder of model Amy Leigh Barnes

By Calvin Palmer

The former boyfriend of teenage model Amy Leigh Barnes was given a life sentence today after he was found guilty of her murder.

Football coach Ricardo Morrison, 22, was convicted after an 11-day trial at Manchester Crown Court. He will serve a minimum of 24 years in jail.

Clutching a Bible, Morrison bowed his head, put one hand to his face and appeared to begin weeping when the verdict was given. He slumped to his seat with his head down, held in his hands.

Morrison attacked the 19-year-old model at the house where they lived in Farnworth, near Bolton. He inflicted multiple stab wounds with a kitchen knife and the fled to his mother’s house in in Rubery, West Midlands.

Melda Wilks, 50, a policewoman for almost 30 years, was cleared of assisting an offender.

She allowed him to wash his bloodstained clothes after he fled Bolton to the family home, hours after the attack on November 8 last year.

She told the jury she believed her son when he told her he had not harmed Amy.

“I was not thinking as a police officer but as a mother,” she said.

Barnes had modeled for Cosmopolitan and Nuts magazine and appeared in the teen drama Hollyoaks.

During the trial, details emerged of a stormy ten-month relationship in which Morrison was regularly abusive and violent towards her.

The jury heard that she was often seen in bars and clubs frequented by professional footballers. Morrison resented her close friendships with some of them and had attacked and threatened her on numerous occasions.

In a text message sent to a footballer friend days before her death, Barnes described Morrison as “psycho”.

On the morning of her death, she texted another footballer and accused Morrison of punching her, spraying aerosol in her mouth and slamming her arm in a door at her grandmother’s house, where they were living.

When Morrison left the house after locking her inside, Barnes phoned her mother and arranged for her father to go to the house and free her.

Her father, Andrew Barnes, set off but before he reached the house Morrison had returned and launched his fatal attack, slashing his girlfriend’s face and stabbing her nine times in the chest and back with a 6in knife.

Andrew Barnes arrived minutes later to find his daughter lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Her phone lay at the side of her body. She died two hours later in hospital.

[Based on reports by The Daily Telegraph and The Times.]

DNA tests prove innocence of Texas prisoner after 23 years in jail

By Calvin Palmer

A Texas man who has spent more than two decades in prison after being convicted of sexual assault is due to be exonerated by DNA testing.

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said today that post-conviction tests have proved Jerry Lee Evans is innocent.

Evans, 47, was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after being convicted of aggravated sexual assault with a deadly weapon.

His victim picked him out of a photo lineup one year after the assault near downtown Dallas.

A hearing is scheduled for tomorrow to enter the DNA test results in court.

The New York-based Innocence Project says Dallas County has led the nation in DNA exonerations since 2000. Evans would be the county’s 21st.

[Based on a report by the Associated Press.]

Former soldier gets life sentence for rape and murder in Iraq

By Calvin Palmer

Former U.S. Army soldier Steven Dale Green was today sentenced to life in prison for raping and killing an Iraqi teenage girl and murdering her family.

Jurors who convicted Green on May 7 deliberated for 10 hours over the course of two days but could not agree on an appropriate sentence. Their choice was a death sentence or life in prison without parole. Failing to reach a unanimous decision meant the sentence had to be life in prison.

His father, John Green, of Midland, Texas, said: “It’s the better of two bad choices.”

His son will be sentenced September 4 by U.S. District Judge Thomas B. Russell.

After an afternoon of card playing, sex talk and drinking Iraqi whiskey on March 12, 2006, Green, 24, of Midland, Texas, and three other soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division went to the home of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

Green shot and killed the teemage girls’ mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape the girl before shooting her in the face.

Defense  attorneys never denied Green’s involvement in the attack, instead focusing on building a case that he did not deserve the death penalty, arguing he faced an unusually stressful combat tour in Iraq in a unit that suffered heavy casualties and did not receive sufficient Army leadership while serving in Iraq’s “Triangle of Death”.

The other soldiers who attacked the family are serving lengthy sentences in military prison, but will be eligible for parole. They testified against Green, who was tried in federal court as a civilian because he had been discharged from the Army before his arrest.

“This trial represents some of the most important principles of our Constitution and our democracy in action,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marisa Ford said. “The decision of how justice would be best served was left to the people.”

One of Green’s attorneys, Darren Wolff of Louisville, said his client twice offered to plead guilty, but the U.S. Justice Department refused amid international pressure for a conviction.

“Mr. Green will spend the rest of his life in jail and the events of March 12, 2006, have forever changed the lives of many,” Wolff said. “It is a tragic case on so many levels.”

The trial was held in western Kentucky because the 101st Airborne Division is based at Fort Campbell.

[Based on a report by the Associated Press.]

German war game fanatic infatuated by redhead stabbed her boyfriend 86 times

By Calvin Palmer

A German computer game fanatic who became infatuated with the girlfriend of a British student and stabbed him to death was found guilty of murder at Nottingham Crown Court today and sentenced to life in prison.

David Heiss, 21, became obsessed with 21-year-old redhead Joanna Witton after meeting her through the war gaming Web site she ran with Matthew Pyke from their flat above the Orange Tree pub in Nottingham city center.

He forced his way into the flat and stabbed Pyke 86 times. In his dying moments, the 20-year-old managed to write DAV, the first three letters of Heiss’s first name, in his own blood on the side of his computer to alert police to his killer’s identity.

Heiss travelled to England twice to see Witton before returning for the fatal visit in September last year. In June, the couple had confronted Heiss, telling him that he “crept them out” and blocking him from their Warscentral Web site.

Mr Justice Keith said that Heiss had remained in denial about the murder.

“I have no doubt that at some stage you decided that Matthew had to die, and that your killing of him involved a substantial degree of both planning and premeditation, which is a significant aggravating factor.

“You may not have had a clear idea in your own mind by the time you bought your return ticket on September 11, but I’m sure you thought that Matthew had to be removed following the chatroom conversation that you had with him on September 14.

“I don’t believe you brought the knife with you because you decided to kill yourself with it, but you brought it with you to kill Matthew and then make it look as if he had killed himself.”

The judge added: “For your premeditated and carefully-planned murder, as well as its ferocity, I consider that you should not be released by the parole board until you have served 18 years in prison.”

After flying into Birmingham International on September 18, Heiss took a train to Nottingham, arriving shortly before 1am and slept behind the air-conditioning unit on the roof of the flat Pyke and Witton shared

The next morning Witton left for work shortly before 7:00 a.m. Heiss then forced his way into the flat and launched the ferocious attack on Pyke.

Grisly pictures seen by the jury showed the trail of blood from the doorway and splattered walls, as well as on shoes and trainers and finally on the bedroom floor.

It is thought the fatal wound was to Mr Pyke’s left lung but his injuries also included damage to his chest and liver.

Heiss told the court he only meant to give Pyke a “beating” but used the knife in self-defense when the pair started scuffling.

After the attack, Heiss changed into another set of clothes and tried to make it look like a robbery. He removed several items from the flat and then flew straight back to Germany, arriving back at his home in Limburg near Frankfurt just 16 hours after he had left. Police found his blood stained clothes in a suitcase under his bed, along with a suicide note he had penned as if written by Pyke.

Detective Chief Inspector Tony Heydon said the brutality of the attack and the clinical planning involved had made it the most harrowing case he had investigated.

“In my view, David Heiss is the most callous, cold-hearted individual I have dealt with. Throughout the trial he has failed to display any emotion about what he has done, despite the clear effect it has had on everyone else involved, and has lied continuously in an effort to escape justice.

“It is chilling that even at the end of his evidence, he agreed that he still had not given up hope of being with Joanna. I’m delighted the jury saw through these lies and found him guilty of Matthew’s murder.

“While this is an extremely unusual case, one thing is clear and that is that Heiss used the internet to harass and stalk Joanna and Matthew.

“He eventually found out where they lived and other information about them that enabled him to carry out his plans, and we should all consider the amount of personal information we share on web systems like MSN and on internet forums.”

[Based on reports by The Times, Daily Mail and East Anglia Daily Times.]