NATHAN MATTHEWS (28) HAS been found guilty of murdering his 16-year-old step-sister Becky Watts in a horrific, pre-planned, sexually-motivated attack.
His girlfriend, Shauna Hoare, 22, was found guilty of her manslaughter. She was acquitted of her murder.
Both were also found guilty of conspiracy to kidnap Becky, perverting the course of justice and preventing a lawful burial, the Guardian reports.
The jury’s decisions were read out at Bristol Crown Court this afternoon. The pair will be sentenced on Friday.
The five-week trial has heard how the 28-year-old man went to Becky’s home on 19 February, equipped with stun-guns and handcuffs, apparently ready to kidnap and kill.
The teenager went missing that day, just hours after texting her boyfriend that she loved him. Her remains- dismembered body parts – were found just under two weeks later.
Mathews had admitted to killing and dismembering his step-sister but denied murder.
He told police he had wanted to “teach her a lesson” as he believed she had treated his mother unfairly. But claimed the plan went wrong.
He also said that Hoare had no knowledge of the killing, a claim dismissed as ridiculous by the prosecution.
However, during the court proceedings, the jury was told that the pair had carried out a sexually-motivated attack as they both had an interest in petite teenage girls.
Phone and computer evidence was admitted to show a fascination with pornography around schoolgirl themes.
Family and friends of the victim have attended court throughout the trial, subjected to distressing details of how she died. They heard how she was killed by suffocation through strangulation in her bedroom at her home.
The jury was told that her body was later put in their car and brought to Matthews and Hoare’s home.
CCTV footage showed the pair driving that evening with what appeared to be a child sitting in the rear of the car.
The couple ordered a takeaway and browsed television schedules on a phone.
It was in their home that her body was cut up with a saw and hidden in boxes in a nearby shed.
The jury heard DNA associated with Hoare was found on the inside of a safety mask and on the inside of a knot in a bag used to wrap up Becky’s remains.
Her defence centred on the physical and psychological abuse she says she endured at the hands of Mathews over the years. They began their relationship when she was about 14 or 15.
The court was told that Becky had suffered 15 stab wounds to her abdomen after she died and she had also been struck in the neck with a screwdriver.
There was also chilling CCTV footage of Mathews buying a saw in a local DIY store on the day before her death.
BBC News reports that two other men – 29-year-old Donovan Demetrius and 23-year-old James Ireland – were acquitted of a charge of assisting an offender.
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