Murder case teacher ’spoke of sex games to colleague’
SPECIAL needs teacher Jane Longhurst confessed to colleagues she let her boyfriend suffocate her during sex, years before she was killed by bondage-obsessed Graham Coutts, it is alleged.
Guitarist Coutts, 39, admits throttling the Reading-born teacher in 2003 but denies murder, claiming the death was an accident after a sex game went too far.
Former colleague Ruth Sinclair, who taught with Jane at Netherhall School in Cambridge, told an Old Bailey jury of hearing revelations about her friend’s sex life.
Miss Sinclair alleged Jane made a giggling confession about her boyfriend, a man called Lincoln, during a staff room chat in 1996.
She recalled: “She said the sex involved some kind of stopping breathing. This was in a very busy, very loud staff room and it was something that was said into my ear. It was said to at least two other people as well.
“She was kind of laughing about it and giggling about it. I got the feeling that she was not unwilling to do this.”
Miss Sinclair said she immediate-ly recalled that conversation when she heard Jane’s body was found in secluded woodland with a ligature still around her neck.
She told the court: “I thought back to what she had said and thought somebody might have done that to her; some kind of stopping breathing thing.
“I thought somebody might have done the same thing and killed her.”
Earlier the court heard how Coutts hid the body in his garden shed before moving it to a storage unit, where he visited over a five-week period for sexual gratification.
Philip Katz QC, prosecuting, asked: “You were visiting the body for your own sexual pleasure, weren’t you? It gave you a sexual thrill.”
Coutts said: “That’s not true. There’s nothing sexual about a dead body. Nothing. And the smell was getting worse and worse.
“There’s nothing remotely sexual about that.”
Mother Liz Longhurst, who lives in Whitley, listened as the evidence emerged against Coutts, on trial for the second time.
It is alleged Coutts, who was obsessed with porn and snuff websites, murdered her as part of a perverted fantasy and fetish for dead bodies.
Jane was last seen alive at 7.30am on March 14, 2003, by boyfriend Malcolm Sentence, 34, at their Brighton home.
Later that day Jane accompanied Coutts to the swimming baths before returning to his flat in Waterloo Street, Brighton.
The trial continues.
from icberkshire.icnetwork.co.uk