Musician Found Guilty Of Murdering Special Needs Teacher

A Scottish musician who trawled violent pornographic websites was today found guilty of murdering a special needs teacher to act out a perverted fantasy. Graham Coutts, 39, strangled Jane Longhurst with a pair of tights after forcing her into sex, the Old Bailey heard.

He then hid her body in a storage depot before taking it to secluded woodland and setting fire to it. Coutts was found guilty by an 11 to one majority. The jury had been deliberating for 13 hours.

Originally from Leven, in Fife, he went to school in Glenrothes before his family moved to England. His parents, Frank and Elizabeth Coutts, are said to have moved back to Leven recently.

There were cheers from the public gallery where Miss Longhurst’s mother Liz, 76, had been watching the trial. Other relatives threw their arms into the air.

Jurors were told that Coutts killed her to satisfy a “long-standing and perverted sexual interest” in the strangling to death of women. They rejected his claims that the death was a tragic accident.

Coutts was first found guilty of Miss Longhurst’s murder in 2004 but a re-trial was ordered after Law Lords ruled his conviction was unsafe because jurors were not offered the alternative count of manslaughter. Meanwhile, ministers pledged to outlaw the viewing of violent and extreme pornography on the internet after a campaign by the victim’s mother, Liz Longhurst.

Coutts, of Waterloo Street, Hove, East Sussex, killed Miss Longhurst, who lived in Brighton but was originally from Reading, in March 2003. Philip Katz QC, prosecuting, told the court he had been looking at “horrific” images on pornography websites the day before. Afterwards he repeatedly visited the body, which he kept in a storage unit and regarded as his “trophy”, for a “sexual thrill”, the court heard.

A former partner told the court that Coutts had confessed: “I get the most awful feeling that I’m going to strangle and kill a woman.” Later he told a psychiatrist that since the age of 15 he had been having thoughts about murdering women and feared they might lead him to commit crime. “His sexual turn-on was in serious violence to women, killing women by strangulation and sex with dead women,” Mr Katz said.