A predatory paedophile escaped justice for more than 30 years after sexually assaulting and murdering two nine-year-old girls in 1986, a court has heard.
Russell Bishop, 52, killed Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows in a hidden corner of a Brighton park on 9 October 1986, the Old Bailey was told.
But he escaped justice when he was acquitted at a murder trial in 1987, Brian Altman QC, prosecuting, told the court.
Now, however, Bishop is being retried after some of the old scientific evidence was reassessed using modern-day DNA profiling techniques, the jury was told.
In addition, Mr Altman said, “the defendant’s movements, his actions and what he had to say to the police, including significant lies” also provided “compelling evidence that this man was the killer.”
The investigation into the deaths of Karen and Nicola has become the largest and longest-running enquiry Sussex Police has ever known.
On the day of the murder, the two girls, friends on the Moulsecoomb council estate in the north of Brighton, had gone out to play after school.
On the following day, October 10 1986, after a search by police and public, they were found dead in the woods at Wild Park in Brighton, about half a mile from their homes.
“Both girls had been strangled to death and they had been sexually assaulted,” Mr Altman said. “Plainly the main, if not the only motive here was sexual and paedophilic.”
“There are rarely witnesses to killings like these,” the prosecutor added. “The location in this case was what was referred to as a den; a small clearing in the woods hidden from view and from anyone else.”
Bishop, Mr Altman said, “knew important details about the situation and condition of the girls at the scene that only the killer could have known.”
“Russell Bishop was, to the exclusion of anyone else, responsible for the murders of the two little girls."
"The killings," Mr Altman added, "Were entirely intentional and they were carried out in the woods by a man who sexually assaulted them for his own gratification. That man, say the prosecution, was this defendant, Russell Bishop.”
Prior to the trial starting on Tuesday, the Court of Appeal quashed Bishop’s 1987 acquittal without drawing any conclusion about his guilt or innocence.
The jury has now also been told that four years after the deaths of Karen and Nicola, Bishop was convicted of the February 1990 indecent assault, kidnap and attempted murder of a seven-year-old Brighton girl, who survived her ordeal.
Mr Altman told the jurors: “All the similarities between the events of which he was convicted in 1990 and those of 1986 are such that, together with all the other evidence in the case, they can lead you to the sure conclusion that the defendant was responsible also for the murders of Nicola and Karen but a few years earlier.”
Bishop, however, denies murdering Karen and Nicola.
As Mr Altman opened the case, Karen’s mother Michelle Johnson sat in the back of the court tightly clutching the hands of her daughters, Karen’s two sisters.
The Old Bailey heard how Karen’s mother had considered her to be “a very sensible girl who knew right from wrong”, but who, like all children, could occasionally be “cheeky”.
Nicola, Mr Altman said, was described by her family as friendly and outgoing.
Both girls, the court heard, were afraid of the dark.
At the time of the murders, Bishop was a 20-year-old roofer living in Hollingdean, Brighton, about one and a half miles from the girls’ homes.
He knew Nicola’s father, but the jury was told that neither family wanted the girls to have any contact with Bishop because at the time he was in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl, despite having an adult woman partner.
On the afternoon of the murder, the court heard, Bishop called at Nicola’s house, hoping to talk to a lodger who also lived there.
The court heard, however, that Nicola told Bishop to go away and called his teenage girlfriend a “slag”.
Mr Altman stressed that there was no physical contact between Bishop and Nicola during this exchange, and explained: “This [will be] significant when we come to consider the scientific evidence that was later found to show a contact between the defendant and Nicola.”
The trial continues.
