July 1996
Ten years later, nineteen-year-old Katrina was not so safe.
A £200-per-week heroin habit and providing for her baby was taking its toll. It did not take much for two local men to persuade her to act as lookout as they burgled a house in Bolney Road, Moulsecoomb, just across the road from her family home.
During their hunt for drugs they trashed Neisha Williams’ house, smashed up furniture, pulled out a washing machine – causing a flood – and set fire to a pile of clothes. They stole jewellery, some of which Katrina sold for a paltry £20 to buy drugs. For keeping watch and selling the proceeds she was charged with burglary. But for some this was not payback enough and revenge was sought.
Neisha’s brothers Jason and Simon, together with her ex-boyfriend, Trevor Smith, and his close friend Fergal Scollan and others who were never identified, were said to be on the hunt for those responsible.
Luckily for the first burglar, the police found him before the vigilantes did. With him in custody, the gang searched for the other. He was less fortunate.
It was a shame he could not bring himself to confirm to the police who it was that beat him up, stabbed him in the legs and viciously assaulted his innocent friend who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Katrina’s arrest the next day brought only a temporary reprieve as, despite the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) asking magistrates to remand her in custody, she was bailed and went into hiding. It took Simon Williams two months to track her down but when he did, chancing upon her outside a seafront hotel, he forced her to go to Neisha’s new house in Centurion Road, Brighton. Once there, Williams summoned Smith and Scollan from London. Katrina was held captive until she agreed to pay for the damage caused during the burglary. She must have thought them most benevolent when they agreed repayments of £10 per week.
Later that evening, however, matters took a darker turn when screaming was heard in St Nicholas’ churchyard, a few yards from the house. The following morning, a shocked dog walker stumbled across Katrina’s mutilated corpse, bloodied and abandoned in the graveyard. A post mortem concluded she had been restrained from behind and stabbed six times, once in the arm and five times to the chest.
During the trial at Lewes Crown Court in July 1997, Neisha and Simon Williams said that Katrina had left the flat with Smith and Scollan. They maintained the two men returned a short while later saying she was dead. Smith and Scollan denied this and said it was Simon Williams who was responsible.
The Williamses were acquitted of the murder while Smith and Scollan were convicted but, in a twist, two years later they successfully appealed and at their retrial at the Central Criminal Court the judge directed the jury to acquit them both on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Smith had admitted false imprisonment but, due to time already served, he, along with Scollan, walked out a free man.
No one stands convicted of Katrina’s horrific and senseless murder. That she was killed for playing a minor part in a burglary shows how cheap human life can be. The case, like the Babes in the Wood, frustrated Sussex Police for years.
The tragedy and poignancy that Nicola and her stand-in Katrina are bound together in their untimely ruthless murders and their denial of justice for decades has remained a wretched sub-plot to these brutal events.