Free Murder.com by Christopher Berry-Dee, Steven Morris

Coutts would stare blankly into space during these episodes, obviously very far away in his imaginary world. If ever she requested him to stop, he would reluctantlyaccede to her wishes, but only after maintaining his grip on her throat for a while longer.
    Coutts, it was noted, also derived pleasure from tightening stockings and white cotton knickers around Sandra’s neck and, as always, he relished any opportunity to frighten her. This was something at which he had become quite skilled.
    On one occasion, he shoved a pillow over her face during sex. Sandra panicked, struggling hard. Coutts finally relented, but that odd gaze of his remained fixed on her.
    Now, struggling to retain her composure and taking occasional sips of water from the cup provided by the court usher, Sandra went on, ‘I suppose I tried to keep him happy so he wouldn’t be shouting at the kids all the time. If I refused to let him have sex, he would only persist until he got his way.’
    Like so many other women who have had relationships with such predators, Sandra questioned her own motives for remaining with this man. ‘Why I stayed with him I’ll never know. I was frightened. By the end I couldn’t sleep and suffered panic attacks.’
    Among Coutts’s wide-ranging sexual deviations, he was also an accomplished peeping Tom. When asked by the prosecution about his voyeuristic pursuits in the home the coupled shared, Sandra became distraught. ‘He used to peep at my girls when they were getting undressed,’ she explained. ‘He even drilled a hole in the bathroom ceiling to watch them bathing. And he once hid in the wardrobe so he could peek at one of my girls.’
    When Sandra became pregnant with Coutts’s child, the father-to-be was anything but overjoyed. In fact, he informed her that he did not want children and was emigrating to South Africa. ‘As I already had five kids, I had a termination. He cameback from South Africa five weeks later and didn’t even mention the baby.’
    Recounting Coutts’s movements around this time, Sandra said that he would disappear often, sometimes for an entire weekend. ‘He said he needed space and would go up north, saying he was seeing friends, playing at a gig or visiting his parents in Scotland.’
    Coutts could be very secretive about his sojourns ‘up north’ and would often become quite aggressive if Sandra scrutinised him too closely. Sometimes she would pick up the phone and it would be a girl wanting to speak to Graham. He would explain these calls away, offering that they were ‘groupies’ who were obsessed by him because he was a musician.
    His temper was a force to be reckoned with too. When enraged he would grow very pale and literally froth at the mouth. He would scream obscenities at Sandra, branding her worthless and unstable. The fact that he was the sole cause of her anxieties seemed to go unnoticed by him.
    Coutts physically attacked Sandra on a number of occasions. Although she was inevitably distressed by these incidents, nothing he did could compare with the ‘emotional battering’ that he constantly subjected her to. As an aside to all this terrible abuse, he told Sandra he thought it would be a good idea to get married and, as she later made clear, he was an obsessive list-maker, even going as far as to keep a record of potential wedding guests. ‘I would never have married him,’ Sandra said firmly. ‘Deep down I knew he was mad.’
    In 1995, while Coutts was away on business, Sandra made an unpleasant discovery. He had, for some time, kept a locked briefcase under their bed. With him out of the house for a while,Sandra, whose curiosity had long since got the better of her, took the opportunity to prise open the mystery case. What she found unnerved her.
    Inside was a large cache of pornographic snapshots of girls ‘trussed up’. On one photograph Coutts had taken the liberty of drawing a ligature around the neck of a girl he worked with.
    This doodling and doctoring of