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

photographic images is fairly common among perverted sexual fantasists. Gerard Schaefer, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy and serial murderer whose grisly signature was to hang the girls he murdered, was shown to have kept a collection very similar to Coutts’s. Schaefer had even drawn crude nooses around the necks of models in magazines to accommodate his burgeoning preoccupation with the asphyxiation of young women.
    Then there was one of Coutts’s meticulous lists with each of the girls’ names on it, all in sequence. When Sandra confronted him about this sinister trove, he reacted with typical melodrama, begging her for forgiveness and insisting that he could never harm anyone, that the pictures were just fuel for fantasies he kept safely stored in his brain. There was no danger of them ever spilling over into reality and engulfing somebody. Honestly, it was the truth. He even promised to seek help, he told her.
    A few nights later, however, with the storm apparently over, Coutts wandered into the bedroom with that familiar strange look in his eye. When Sandra asked him what was wrong, she was met with a vicious punch to the eye that sent her reeling. As she lay there on the carpet, shocked and hurt, Coutts let her know that he had a strong feeling he was going to rape and kill someone before long. He then abruptly turned and left the bewildered woman where she lay.
    Later, after a phone call from his father and with the deranged Coutts crying and mumbling incoherently, it was decided once and for all that he needed psychological help. Coutts, in fact, went as far as actually making an appointment but later refused to attend when he learned that the psychologist was a woman.
    In the end, his doctor prescribed a course of antidepressants. But he would not take them, telling Sandra that he was worried they might negatively affect his sex drive. Despairing, Sandra finally ended her relationship with this human pressure cooker in April 1996, when her 18-year-old son Daniel died.
    Daniel had absolutely despised Coutts and the intolerable atmosphere he brought to the home. The teenager spent long periods away from the house in order to escape this egotistical interloper and ultimately drifted towards crime as an outlet. Tragically, he was to fall to his death from a rooftop during a burglary. ‘I often wonder if Daniel would have turned to crime if Coutts hadn’t been living with us,’ Sandra later said. ‘He really hated him.’
    Soon after Daniel’s death, and probably sensing that Coutts felt it was about time to move on to victimise someone else, Sandra ordered her partner to leave her home. Coutts readily agreed.
    When he met Lisa Stephens, his love of dangerous sex games did not, of course, diminish, and through her he met Jane Longhurst. Jane fitted his fantasy-female profile to a T. From the moment he saw her, it was quite simply a case of biding his time. As the urges within this fledgling homicidal madman grew, the visage of lovely Jane Longhurst burned within him. One day he would have her. When he was finally ready to explode, her name was at the very top of his list.
    After Sandra Gates’s testimony, one of the items on the agendaat Court 1 was the reassembling of the jury at the Big Yellow Storage Company in Brighton. The prosecution wanted them to witness the conditions under which Jane’s desecrated corpse had been stashed.
    Judge Richard Brown had agreed to this request for the jury to visit the premises where Jane had been left in a large cardboard box sealed with heavy-duty tape. However, the storage unit had since been rendered unusable, so they viewed the premises of a similar unit belonging to the company. Accompanied by counsel for the defence and the prosecution, they examined the kind of conditions that Coutts, under his false name of Paul Kelly, had returned to time and time again, utilising an ‘out-of-hours’ key to enter the unit and commit further atrocities on Jane’s decomposing