A serial rapist murdered a young mother in front of her baby son just days after being bailed over another sex attack. Crack cocaine addict Christopher Braithwaite, 22, was arrested for a rape in August last year but was released the next day.
He killed 23-year- old Stacey Westbury a week later.The case will reignite debate on whether bail should be granted to those accused of serious offences. Government lawyers recently ruled that a blanket ban on bail for murder suspects would breach their human rights.
Braithwaite is today beginning a life sentence, and the prosecution has asked for six charges of rape against two other young women to remain on his file.Braithwaite denies carrying out those six rapes, but he dramatically halted his trial this week to admit sexually attacking and murdering Stacey.
He was arrested on suspicion of raping a woman in her twenties on August 9 last year, but was released the next day pending further police investigation. Then on August 17 he killed Stacey in her home in West London while her ten-month-old son Kayden lay in his cot yards away.
Katherine Rake of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for justice for women, said yesterday: ‘The fact Braithwaite was released on bail shows that criminal justice agencies have utterly failed to implement adequate safeguards.
‘There is an urgent need for the Government to do more to ensure that better evidence is collected and acted upon when dealing with rape cases.’
The Old Bailey heard that Braithwaite, who had been at school with Stacey, sexually attacked her before killing her.
Her father Ken found her body 18 hours later, with her face bloodied and bruised from repeated punches. She had been strangled and stabbed in the neck, stomach and right hand with a nine-inch blade.
Her son was still in his cot, while his mother’s body lay on the sofa yards away. After the killing, jobless Braithwaite had tried to wash the blood from Stacey’s naked corpse, before ransacking her flat trying to find anything he could sell for drugs.
Stacey’s mother Lorraine Beasley, a dinner lady, said that Kayden had suffered nightmares and would scream hysterically if strangers came to the family’s home. In a statement read to the court, she said: ‘
Kayden has had his first birthday, which every child should spend with their Mum. Christmas was just terrible. Stacey should have been with us to watch her son open his presents.’
An statement from Mr Westbury was also read to the judge before sentencing. He said: ‘I can only describe the initial feeling of discovering what had happened to Stacey as numb shock, to be replaced very quickly by the most awful pain I have ever felt.
‘I also felt a white-hot rage that someone could do this to my little girl. On the day of Stacey’s funeral I stood at her graveside. You shouldn’t have to bury your children.’
Braithwaite offered no explanation for his actions but told psychiatrists that he suffered from fits of intense rage and paranoia, made worse by his drug abuse. He started smoking cannabis when he was 12 and began using body-building steroids and crack cocaine in 2005, when he was in his late teens.
By the time of the murder he was smoking ten to 12 rocks of crack a day and told psychiatrists it helped to stop his ‘bad thoughts’, the court heard. He said he had become engulfed by rage in Stacey’s flat when the young mother began asking him about the rape of the other woman seven days earlier.
The court heard he had previously admitted a February 2005 stabbing in which his victim was wounded. However, he escaped jail and was given a two-year rehabilitation order and was told to attend anger management classes.
Braithwaite, of Shepherds Bush in West London, was told he would serve a minimum of 30 years before he would be considered for parole. He will not be eligible for early release if he is still considered a danger to women.
The two women whom Braithwaite is alleged to have raped declined to comment last night.
The CPS said it had consulted them before deciding to accept his guilty plea and drop those prosecutions, because he was already facing a life sentence.
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