A graduate who was stalked by her soldier ex-boyfriend chose not to have him arrested for harassing her days before he slit her throat “from ear to ear”, a murder trial was told.
Alice Ruggles, 24, still cared about Trimaan “Harry” Dhillon, 26, despite his campaign of emotional blackmail after she ended their relationship because of his cheating, a court heard.
Jurors were told Ruggles grew so concerned by Dhillon’s behaviour that she reported him to the police after he had travelled from his barracks in Edinburgh to knock on her bedroom window at night.
Richard Wright QC, prosecuting, said Alice called the police again on 7 October last year. The officer who had been in charge of her case was on leave, Wright said, so it went to another police constable who left to Ruggles the decision over whether to arrest Dhillon.
Wright told Newcastle crown court: “He put the decision on Alice’s shoulders: ‘do you want us to arrest him or not?’ Sadly the dilemma this young girl was left in is obvious. She was scared and worried by his behaviour but she had cared for and even loved him at one time. Generously, she decided not to have him arrested and she paid for that decision with her life five days later.”
Dhillon severed Alice’s throat with a kitchen knife in the shower after breaking into her ground-floor flat in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, on 12 October last year, the court heard.
Wright said Dhillon took photographs of her backyard, perhaps as reconnaissance, two nights before the murder. Dhillon drew the blade across her neck six times in the attack, the court heard. His victim also suffered a wound to the nose and her hand as well as chest injuries as if she had been knelt on, Wright said.
The jury was played the 999 call when Alice’s flatmate and colleague Maxine McGill found her “blue” and covered in blood on the floor. Breathing heavily and sounding very distressed, the friend named the soldier as the suspect.
The prosecutor said McGill immediately knew Alice was dead. He said: “She had suffered horrendous injuries she could not have survived. Someone had slit her throat open from ear to ear, leaving her neck wide open.”
McGill told the call-handler that Ruggles had reported having trouble with ex-boyfriend Dhillon, saying she had called 101 in the past.
Wright said: “Maxine had seen the obsessive and manipulative manner in which Dhillon had harassed and stalked Alice in the weeks and months before her death.
She had seen first hand how Alice’s happy, bubbly demeanour had changed over time.”
Alice was short and slight compared with the tall and well-built Dhillon, the prosecutor added.
The soldier, who had passed some of the courses to join the special forces, had served in Afghanistan but not in a combat role and the army was unaware of any traumatic episode during his service, the court heard.
He denies murdering the 24-year-old former Northumbria University student, who was originally from Leicestershire.
The trial continues.
• This article was amended on 11 April 2017 to correct a date.
