My daughter, too, was strangled by a man obsessed with violent images. Someone has to take a stand

Liz Longhurst says her heart always does a little lurch when she hears of another young woman missing and another set of anxious parents doomed to wait for news.

So it was with Jo Yeates and her family.

Like so many, Mrs Longhurst prayed for the talented young landscape architect when she went missing; and wept for her parents when her body was discovered on Christmas Day.



Gentle and trusting: Murder victim Jane Longhurst

She understood more than most what the Yeates family were going through. Her own daughter Jane’s body – defiled and burned – had been discovered on an Easter weekend eight years previously, five agonising weeks after she went missing.

Like Jo, Jane Longhurst, a 31-year-old teacher and talented violinist, was strangled by a man she trusted. Like Vincent Tabak, Graham Coutts had seemed like an ordinary, decent guy. Until his hands closed around her neck.

‘Even before the trial there were so many similarities that this one affected me much more than some others over the years,’ admits softly-spoken, 80-year-old Mrs Longhurst. ‘Jo Yeates and Jane were both young, clever, talented, beautiful, with their whole futures ahead. You cannot help but draw parallels.’

That there are further shocking similarities between the deaths of the two young women has enraged Mrs Longhurst. Only after his trial was it revealed that Vincent Tabak shared Graham Coutts’s penchant for internet porn.



Murderer: Graham Coutts watched footage of simulated strangulation before going on to kill

Much of Coutts’s trial had focused on his unhealthy – and ultimately murderous – obsession with extreme images. So furious was Mrs Longhurst that her daughter’s killer was (quite legally) allowed to look at footage of simulated strangulation before killing her daughter that she embarked on an impassioned campaign to have the law changed.

She succeeded, up to a point. In 2009 it became an offence to possess certain extreme pornographic images. But did it go far enough? And did it make one iota of difference to the young women, like Jane, that she had sought to protect?

Tabak also perused horrifying images in the days before he killed Jo. Lurid footage of women being strangled during sexual play, and of bodies being bundled into car boots, were found on his computer hard-drive. They might not have been the stomach-churning sort of images favoured by Coutts – who frequented sites specialising in necrophilia – but they were troubling nonetheless, especially given Jo’s ultimate fate.

That a jury was not allowed to decide for itself whether there were links between Tabak’s porn viewing and his killing of Jo appals Mrs Longhurst. ‘I was just baffled as to why this wasn’t allowed to be used as evidence against Tabak in court, as it was in my daughter’s case,’ she says. ‘How could anyone possibly argue that his internet use wasn’t relevant?

‘The images the police found – women being strangled, for the viewer’s perverted kicks – were exactly what I felt were unacceptable, and the powers-that-be agreed with me. So much so that the law was changed. But it has happened again. I find it disgusting.’

Grieving: Liz Longhurst and her daughter Sue Barnett, pictured in 2003 during an appeal for information in the hunt for Jane's killer

Now that the facts are out there, it underlines, she says, that the battle has not yet been won. Whether the images viewed by Tabak would have come under the ‘obscene’ description the change in the law allowed for is not known, but it does seem that Tabak will now be questioned about the material he was viewing.

Mrs Longhurst believes that the issues she raised so vociferously are as pertinent today – and as complex. Why is it, she argues, that a clearly disturbed individual has to kill before his perversions are deemed unacceptable?

‘Look at how easy it was for Tabak to get hold of these images,’ she says.



‘Everyone says the internet is notoriously difficult to police – yet if you have a website devoted to bomb-making it can be closed down in minutes. I do not understand why the same cannot happen with this dreadfully violent pornographic material. Instead, its existence means that people still think it is “normal”. The fact that the judge in this case didn’t even think it worth being used as evidence is simply inexplicable to me. Was he saying it wasn’t “bad” enough? I am at a loss.

Ordinary guy? Killer Vincent Tabak, pictured with his girlfriend Tanja Morson at Stonehenge

‘The fact is that Vincent Tabak watched this stuff – then went off and killed an innocent young woman. How can there not be a link? We are all affected by things we see. To deny that is just nonsensical.’

Somehow, hearing this grandmother describe what happened to Jane over tea in the living room – where the walls are lined with graduation portraits, and the piano, where Jane first acquired her love of music, still sits – makes it worse. She singles out a favourite family photo before telling me that the ‘saving grace in all of this’ was that her husband Bill died three years before Jane did.

Striking similarities: Both Jane (left) and Jo were young, clever and talented



Mrs Longhurst’s ordeal began in March 2003, when Jane’s boyfriend called her from their flat in Brighton to say he had arrived home to find her missing. Ever practical, she told him not to panic. Didn’t Jane have a music rehearsal planned? But as the hours ticked by, concern mounted.

It was five weeks before her body was discovered in woodland, where it had been set alight. The horrific facts of what happened to her emerged in the months that followed. Coutts, it transpired, was the boyfriend of one of Jane’s friends, Lisa, and the father of Lisa’s unborn twins. He and Jane had been swimming together several times, and the two couples socialised together.

Perverted: Coutts told a psychiatrist he was worried that he might kill a woman

During his trial, he claimed their relationship had become sexual, and that her death was a case of consensual sex gone wrong. But there was no evidence of any such relationship, and her family and friends were appalled at the suggestion. Instead, the prosecution argued, Coutts had allowed his dark obsessions with sexual violence to be made real.

After he strangled Jane with a pair of Lisa’s tights, he moved her body to a storage facility, disposing of it only when suspicions were aroused about the smell.

It was only after his trial that Mrs Longhurst learned Coutts had once sought psychiatric help. He had told a doctor that he feared he would one day kill a woman because of his perverted desires. He was proved right.

‘I think about Jane all the time,’ sighs Mrs Longhurst. ‘I still have questions. I do think about how much planning he had done.

‘Had he been watching Jane, just biding his time? She went to his home to see the new kitten he and Lisa had bought. I feel that even that was a ploy to reel her in. Jane was so gentle, so trusting. She was easy bait.’ Of her campaigning, she adds: ‘I am not a Mary Whitehouse figure, and never claimed to be. I am also not a prude. In fact, Jane talked to me about things – boyfriends, you know – that I wouldn’t have dreamed of talking to my mother about.

‘But I do feel that someone has to stand up and make a fuss about things that have just slid into public acceptance. The liberal campaigners go on about having rights and freedom. That word “freedom” makes me shudder. We should all have freedom. Jane should have had freedom. Jo Yeates should have had freedom. Are some freedoms more important than others?

‘Anyone who tells me that the right to watch women being strangled, for your own gratification, should come higher than a young woman’s right to live needs to get their priorities sorted.’

For a long time, Mrs Longhurst was unwilling to associate with families of other murder victims.

‘I was asked to go to Victim Support, but I refused for ages. I said I wasn’t a victim, I was a survivor. When I did go, I met some amazing people, but I also met those who became destroyed by what had happened. I have refused to go down that road.’