Human resources consultant Megan Newborough, 23, was attacked by lab assistant Ross McCullum in the home she shared with her parents minutes after she first came to visit him there, the jury was told.
He then slit her throat with a carving knife “to make sure she was dead”, then put her in his own car and drove to a remote rural location near the village of Woodhouse Eaves, Leics, where he threw her on a stone. wall in the dense undergrowth.
Megan’s body was found two days after her concerned family reported her missing.
McCullum admitted that she was dead when officers arrived at her Coalville home to question him. The 30-year-old agrees to kill Megan, but pleads not guilty to murder, claiming that he was suffering from “either a temporary loss of control or a mental abnormality” at the time of her death.
On his second day of opening the details of the case to jurors, prosecutor John Cammegh KC recounted how Megan, who lived with her family in Nuneaton but was about to buy her own house, dined “much loved, gregarious but responsible” . she with them before leaving for McCullum’s house.
He said: ‘At the Newboroughs house it was typical Friday afternoon. Megan’s father, Anthony, already knew that she was going to meet someone he had met at work named Ross.
She had first mentioned it a week or so ago. She had told her father that the defendant was a gentleman, that he was kind and introverted. He remembered that Megan seemed relaxed when he left. It was unusual for her to go out without makeup or perfume, or hair, or glasses.
‘She only had her cell phone and her keys. She said that she was going for a walk with Ross; he said he’d be back in a couple of hours. The doorbell camera recorded him closing the front door, getting into her car and driving away from her. It was 19:32.
Cammegh said Megan arrived at McCullum’s house shortly after 8 p.m. m. on August 6 last year and she was “attacked with great violence” sometime “within the next 30 to 40 minutes”. She was dead at 8:49 p.m., she added.
After disposing of her body, he embarked on a ‘calculated’ attempt to cover up Megan’s murder, making a series of fake text messages and calls to her phone, which he dumped in a separate location, leaving his Citreon C3 white. in a car park in Loughborough. , and get rid of the bloodstained clothes, she told herself.
But after police recovered her phone just a mile from McCullum’s address and arrested him on suspicion of kidnapping, she told officers where they could find her, even though she had previously said she had left her house alive. and did not let him know that he had arrived home safely. .
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Megan and McCullum worked for the same building materials company, Leics-based Ibstock Brick, but did not meet until June 2021, some 18 months after he joined as a laborer and cleaner.
The prosecutor added that McCullum impressed managers with his attitude and went on to play a role in the lab analyzing samples and recording the results.
It was there that he met Megan when she and a colleague visited him to audit the department.
McCullum periodically suffered from depression and ADHD, and admitted that he had stopped taking his medication for the condition several weeks before killing Megan.
In an interview with police after his arrest, McCullum claimed that he killed Megan after “getting agitated” when she “attempted to touch him intimately.”
Mr Cammegh told the court: “He told the police that when he told her to get off her she slapped him so he lost control of her and started choking her. He told police that his loss of control was triggered by memories of when he was sexually abused by older boys when he was young.
The jury heard that police subsequently recovered around 3,500 WhatsApp messages between the couple, with the conversation “quickly changing from seeming largely innocent to overwhelmingly sexual”.
Cammegh said Megan was initially as “enthusiastic about sharing her sexual desires as the defendant is hers,” but there came a point “where the tone of the defendant’s messages becomes increasingly distorted and unpleasant.”
He added: “Sexual fetishes emerge: he demands that Megan address him as ‘lord commander’ in fantasy scenarios.
“It may be frivolous, but you might think it’s a sign of what’s really underneath.”
McCullum has admitted manslaughter but denies murder.
Source: https://wikisoon.com/
