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

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    During the 13-day trial, the jury were also given a graphic demonstration by forensic scientist Roger Ide of how a pair of tights found with Jane’s corpse had been tied around her neck. To simulate this chilling act he used a plastic drinks bottle wrapped in foam and filled with water; this was to represent a human neck. He then proceeded to knot a pair of tights around the bottle.
    Addressing the court, Ide suggested that Jane must have been either upright and face-to-face with her killer as he applied the ligature, or lying on her back, after concluding that a half-knot had been tied in the tights to the front side of her neck.
    This image of Coutts kneeling over Jane as he strangled the life from her was a very potent one indeed. Mr Gold, for the defence, attempted to conjure a degree of co-operation between the two parties but Ide disagreed. ‘No!’ he said firmly. ‘The victim was intimidated, overpowered, or forced.’
    A pathologist later told the court how she had to use scissors to cut the cruelly knotted implement of death from Jane’s neck.
    Given that there was overwhelming physical evidence coupled with the numerous CCTV images of Graham Coutts’s various murder-related outings, the case really looked like it could only go one way; and a startling image captured by cameras at Big Yellow showed Coutts hefting along his trophy box. The fact that Jane Longhurst was inside it must have seared the gravity of what was being viewed into every member of the jury.
    It was time next to turn to the defendant’s hoard of gruesome internet porn. The prosecution suggested an ‘obvious parallel between the images Coutts chose to access on his computer and the scene that confronted him at the storage location.’ Briefly eyeing Coutts, who sat with his head down, the prosecution turned back to the jury and added, ‘He acted out, for real, on the unfortunate Jane Longhurst, the fantasies on his computer, the strangling, the killing and the raping of her.’
    Under cross-examination, Coutts maintained the fiction that all this stemmed from a mutually agreed sex game that had gone tragically wrong, and at one point he even managed to summon tears as he spoke of Jane.
    The jury were unmoved.
    On Wednesday, 4 February 2004, they returned a unanimous verdict: guilty of murder. Coutts displayed no visible emotion as Judge Brown quickly passed a mandatory life sentence with a recommended minimum of 30 years to serve.
    And he had some final words for Graham Coutts: ‘By persisting in your denial and making her [Jane’s] loved ones relive her last moments, and the unbelievable degradation of her body, you have shown not a jot of remorse… everything thatthis court has heard about Jane Longhurst shows her to have been the sort of person whose life enriched all those who came into contact with her. Her undoubted love of her partner, her music and her life screamed out of every page of evidence I have heard on this case.’
    Focusing sternly on the man in the dock, he continued, ‘In seeking perverted sexual gratification by way of your sordid and evil fantasies, you have taken her life and devastated the lives of those she loved and of those who loved her.’
    As Coutts was escorted from the witness box, he was jeered and shouted at by members of the gallery. There were yells for him to face Jane’s stricken family and he was called a ‘pig’ and a ‘pervert’ by Sandra Gates as he was led away to begin his new life behind bars.
    After the trial, Jane’s boyfriend, Malcolm Sentance, said he had had a very difficult time in court watching as all the evidence was presented and having to ‘swallow his tongue’where Coutts, whom he described as ‘subhuman’, was concerned. In reference to the killer’s outrageous assertion that Jane had willingly submitted to his desires, Sentance said, ‘That’s the biggest insult. Coutts is a devious man. There’s no truth in anything he said from the word go. If it wasn’t