David Gomersall, 25, attacked John Coxall, 80, using a bed sheet wrapped around his hands (Picture: NTI)

A prisoner strangled a fellow inmate to death because he looked too much like Santa Claus, a court has heard.

David Gomersall, 25, put John Coxall, 80, in a headlock before choking him with a sheet wrapped around his hands on December 3 last year.

He had been due to see a mental health nurse on the day of the killing but failed to attend.

Gomersall denied murder at Nottingham Crown Court.


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The court hard how the pensioner tried to shout ‘help me, help me’ as he was brutally murdered in his cell before being discovered by prison guards.

In a police interview played to the jury on Monday, Gomersall, who was serving three years for threatening to kill someone, said: ‘I grabbed him in a headlock.



‘I had a piece of bed sheet wrapped around my hand. I kind of choked him with the bedding sheet thing. He looked like Santa. How can you kill Santa, man?’

He claims ‘the voices’ in his head told him to carry out the attack at HMP Nottingham (Picture: Google)

Jurors heard a prison officer found Coxall, who was in jail for breaching a restraining order over an ongoing neighbour dispute, dead on the floor of his cell.

Gomersall told Detective Constable Emma Braybrook, from Nottinghamshire Police, during the interview: ‘The voices kept telling me to kill him.’

Prosecutor Shaun Smith QC said: ‘As David Gomersall was later to tell the police, Mr Coxall did put up some resistance.

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‘But what little he was able to offer was snuffed out by this man’s youth and by this man’s strength as he sat astride him.

‘He used so much force to pull the ligature tight that he fractured some of Mr Coxall’s ribs.’

The jury was told that the issue was not whether the defendant carried out the killing, or his intention but what his mental state was at the time.

The trial continues.