On Tuesday, a British judge sentenced a man to 17 years in prison for beating his fiancée to death after she said she wanted to leave him because of his cross-dressing.
Judge John Lafferty said that Amy Parsons, 35, who was bludgeoned to death while she was showering by her fiancé Roderick Deakin-White, 38, was murdered in a “most horrendous, savage and brutal way,” according to The Telegraph. The attack occurred in the flat the couple shared in Whitechapel, east London.
Judge Lafferty told Deakin-White: “Your view was that if you can’t have her, no-one can have her, and you killed her. There is no sentence I can pass upon you today that will bring back Miss Parsons — a young, successful, vivacious and kind-hearted young woman, whose life was brutally taken by you.”
The court had heard that Deakin-White’s cross-dressing had chiefly led to Parsons’ unhappiness; prosecutor Gareth Patterson QC stated, “She was unhappy about this and this was something he had often wanted to do when they were intimate.” The Daily Mail reported that Parsons “had told him she was ending the relationship because she could no longer stand him wearing women’s underwear when they had sex.” News.com.au added, “The killer had regularly worn women’s underwear, stockings and make-up during the relationship and when they sometimes romped.”
Patterson said Parsons had initiated a relationship with another man a few weeks before her murder, which had triggered Deakin-White’s anger and jealousy. He added, “Unwilling to accept that she was going to leave him, he used a metal bar to hit her repeatedly around the head while she was showering in the Docklands flat which they shared.”
After the murder, Deakin-White confessed his actions to someone who convinced him to go to the police, where he claimed that his attack with a metal bar had been an “accident.”
Parsons’ sister, Eve, stated in a victim impact statement that her sister was the “bright light” of the family and a “beautiful person … Nothing could have prepared me to deal with this loss. All of our family are as heartbroken as it is possible to be. There’s a sense of hopelessness you feel when something like this happens. The requirement to identify our beautiful Amy in the mortuary with one side of her face stitched up, was a horrible thing to see. That was our last image of Amy, an image that will never leave us.”
After sentence was pronounced, Eve Parsons stated, “No sentence is going to bring Amy back, but 17 years does not do her justice in our opinion. We are disappointed with the sentence. Based on what the judge had said, he had agreed with so many of the prosecution’s points, we thought the sentence would be much higher … Amy was a very private person. She would be mortified to have all of this out there in the world for people to see. It should not have been and had we not had to come to trial, it would not have been. It is hard to listen to all of that, knowing how she would have felt about it.”