Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators by Carol Anne Davis Page B

strangling her. Sadists often choose strangulation as a method of torture and eventual death as they can tighten then loosen the ligature pressure, enjoying their victim’s struggle for breath.
    The obsession deepens
    Meanwhile, Graham Coutts’ fetish was getting worse. He’d now downloaded over 800 images of women being raped, hung and strangled. Many of the images he downloaded also involved necrophilia, either real or staged. Coutts wanted a woman whom he could rape and strangle and a body which he could return to again and again.
    Power and control were becoming increasingly important to this prematurely-balding man. His guitar playing didn’t bring in a sufficient wage so he’d become a part-time Kleeneze salesman – delivering catalogues door to door and taking orders for cleaning products – to make ends meet. In a few weeks he’d be responsible for twins; yet more stress.
    He told his girlfriend to change the password on their computer so that he could no longer use the Internet to 89
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    access the asphyxiation-oriented sites as he thought this was inconsistent with fatherhood. But trying to ignore his desires only made them stronger, and on 13 March 2003 he spent two hours downloading images of strangled women and masturbating over them.
    The following afternoon Graham Coutts engineered events so that he had Jane to himself. All that’s certain is that she phoned her friend Lisa in the morning as Lisa had been off work for several days with morning sickness. But she’d gone back to work that day and Jane spoke to Graham instead. He probably asked her to go swimming with him – her costume would later be found at his storage unit along with her clothes and mobile phone.
    Raped
    When Graham Coutts had Jane alone in his flat (Lisa wasn’t due back for several hours) he overpowered her and tightly wound a stocking around her throat. He raped her as he strangled her – the strangulation would have taken approximately three minutes and it left the nylon deeply embedded in her neck. He then hid her body in an empty upstairs flat to which he had the keys, probably returning to it frequently and re-enacting his strangling fantasies. In any case, he’d later bound a green scarf around Jane’s neck.
    Eleven days later, knowing that the new tenants of the flat were about to arrive, he rented a storage unit under the pseudonym of Paul Kelly and drove the body there, returning to it ten times for sexual pleasure, making a visit every three to four days.
    Body found
    By mid April the decomposing corpse had begun to give off a noticeably rank odour so on the nineteenth he removed it 90
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    Sadistic Diversity
    from the storage company: the company noticed that when he took away a large box from his unit, the foul smell which had permeated the area disappeared. Coutts then drove to a bird sanctuary at Wiggonholt Common near Pulborough, West Sussex and set fire to Jane’s body, using petrol from a can that he’d bought at a service station in Hove. But he’d covered her head with a box marked ‘Fragile’ – and there was a very similar box at his home also marked with this word. Furthermore, unknown to him, his movements at the storage unit and at the service station had been caught on CCTV.
    Semen
    Interviewed by police, he initially denied everything. But when he was shown the evidence they’d found in his storage locker –
    a used condom and Jane’s blouse smeared with Coutts’ semen, her bloodstained trousers and a bloodstained rope – he began to rock back and forth. Becoming tearful, he said, ‘I can’t talk about it. I just don’t know what happened.’
    Blaming the Internet
    As word of Coutts’ interest in misogynistic websites became public knowledge, various individuals and groups blamed the Internet for Jane Longhurst’s murder. But there were lust murders long before the