The mother of Nathan Matthews has described her son as a “monster” but insisted she still loves him and will visit him in prison to try to discover what drove him to murder his stepsister, Becky Watts.
Becky, 16, was killed in a sexually motivated kidnap plot hatched by Matthews and his partner, Shauna Hoare. Matthews and Hoare are to be sentenced on Friday. Matthews faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.
Matthews’ mother, Anjie Galsworthy, said she and her husband, Darren – Becky’s father – had loved and trusted the killers.
She told Good Morning Britain on Thursday: “He’s a different person; he’s not the child I remember bringing up. I still love him, I just find it hard looking at the monster he’s turned into. He’s totally different from the child I brought up.”
The Galsworthys said they trusted the pair and thought police had made a mistake when they accused Matthews and Hoare. Darren Galsworthy said: “When they arrested them we still said: ‘You’ve got it wrong.’
“We trusted them and the betrayal hurts so much. We loved them – they were all our kids even if they had different DNA. It didn’t make no difference. We loved them, they were our family.”
Anjie Galsworthy said she would “eventually” visit her son in prison in the hope of getting answers. “I will ask him why, why this happened,” she said.
Her husband said: “Unfortunately he got into the witness box and just lied all the way through it. I got so stressed because I couldn’t shout out, I had to be dignified. All we want is the truth, and he wouldn’t give it.”
During the trial at Bristol crown court, Matthews claimed that he alone had accidentally killed Becky when a kidnap plot designed to teach her a lesson for the way she supposedly treated Anjie went wrong.
But detectives unearthed a much more sinister motive. They discovered texts in which Matthews and Hoare exchanged messages about kidnapping petite teenage girls for sex. Their phones and computers were used to access pornography focused on teenagers, young women dressed as schoolgirls and threesomes, and their laptop contained a 17-minute video of a young woman being raped in her own home.
Becky was suffocated in the bedroom of her home in Bristol. She suffered bruising to 40 areas of her body before her death and was stabbed in the stomach 15 times after she had died.
The jury took just three hours and 27 minutes on Wednesday to convict Matthews of murder and Hoare of manslaughter. Both were found guilty of conspiracy to kidnap Becky. They were also convicted of dismembering Becky’s body and hiding her remains in a garden shed.
Darren Galsworthy told Good Morning Britain his daughter “had so many bruises on her, she fought for her life” and added Matthews has “no right to walk God’s green earth”. He continued: “I hate him, he’s absolutely destroyed my entire family. I feel like an empty husk of a man now.
“I feel like I’ve let my daughter down because every dad should be able to fight for his family, but I wasn’t given that choice … they made sure I wasn’t given that choice.” His wife added: “No sentence could be long enough.”
Matthews and Hoare will be sentenced on Friday with Jaydene Parsons, 23, and Karl Demetrius, 30, who owned the shed where Becky’s body parts were hidden. The pair admitted assisting an offender. On Wednesday two others, James Ireland, 23, and Donovan Demetrius, 30, were both acquitted of assisting an offender.
Matthews faces a mandatory life sentence but could die in prison as the sexually motivated murder of a child can carry a whole life order. If so, he will join a small group of killers including the Moors murderer Ian Brady and the serial killer Rose West.
