A LONDON MAN who stabbed his new fiancée to death just hours after they celebrated their engagement with a party at their flat has been convicted of her murder.

24-year-old Ivan Griffin was found guilty at the Old Bailey today of the murder of 38-year-old Sabrina Mullings at their Croydon home in the early hours of Monday, 13 March.

Griffin will be sentenced at a later date.

The court heard that the pair had been in a relationship for just four months after meeting while neighbours in the same residential block in Ravensdale Gardens, south London.

Footage produced in court showed that earlier in the evening of Sunday, 12 March, Griffin and Sabrina were enjoying dancing together at an impromptu celebration captured on the mobile phone of the victim’s daughter Hayleigh, 22, who shared the flat.

However, hours after Hayleigh and her boyfriend Chaise Gore left the pair, they were awoken by noises from the living room.

Hayleigh testified that she heard her mother shouting for help, saying: “Hayleigh, if you love me you will call an ambulance, he’s stabbed himself and you need to save him.” Both she and her boyfriend desperately tried to reach Sabrina to help her, banging on the living room door and shouting to Griffin, but he had barricaded the door shut and refused to open it.

Although they were unable to see what was happening in the room, they could clearly hear Griffin making comments about “devil worship” and “having to cleanse her [Sabrina's] soul”.

Injuries

Hayleigh and Chaise retreated to their bedroom until Griffin opened the living room door and made his way into their room. Griffin was fully dressed, but lifted up his upper clothing to reveal stab wounds to his chest and abdomen that he said he had caused to himself. He apologised to them both for what he had done before he calmly left the flat.

Hayleigh and Chaise then made their way to the living room where they were confronted with what was described as a horrific scene. Sabrina was lying naked on the kitchen floor bleeding from several injuries.

An ambulance was called, followed by police, but paramedics were unable to save Sabrina and she was pronounced dead at the scene. A subsequent post-mortem examination gave the cause of death as stab wounds to the abdomen and chest.

CCTV footage played to the jury revealed that Griffin spent the hours after the murder wandering around the streets of south London, semi-naked and bleeding from his injury.

Detective Chief Inspector Will Reynolds, of the Met’s Homicide and Major Crime Command, who led the investigation, said:

Griffin callously and viciously attacked a vulnerable, trusting woman that he purported to love and had asked to marry him. He subjected her daughter, Hayleigh, and her boyfriend to the terrible ordeal of hearing the attack on Sabrina but being prevented from helping her, and then callously fled the scene. Her death has left the family utterly devastated.

“I am pleased that the jury did not accept the argument put forward of diminished responsibility and have rightly found Griffin fully accountable for his appalling actions of that terrible night on which Sabrina lost her life.”

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