Claire Tiltman was a 16-year-old girl who was murdered on 18 January 1993 in Greenhithe, Kent, England. Her murder was not solved until 21 years later.
On 12 December 2014, Colin Ash-Smith was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 21 years for her murder. He was already 18 years into a life sentence for two other non-fatal stabbings. [2]
Claire Tiltman, a Year 11 pupil at Dartford Grammar School for Girls, took a short cut down an alleyway on her way to meet a friend near her home in Greenhithe. Around 100 steps from a busy main road down an alleyway, [4] she was stabbed 49 times in an apparently random attack. [5] [6] In February 2014, a man was charged with the murder. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it had sufficient evidence to prosecute 45-year-old Colin Ash-Smith. [7]
Ash-Smith had been jailed for life in December 1996 for knife attacks in 1988 and 1995 on two women. [8] He had admitted stabbing the young women, and leaving them for dead, although both survived. [9]
While in Wakefield Prison, Ash-Smith told a fellow prisoner (Stefen Dubois, real name Molliere), [10] about an attack on a zebra crossing and his “snapping” and stabbing her multiple times. The confession proved to be crucial to bringing him to justice for the murder of Claire Tiltman. [11]
On 12 December 2014, Colin Ash-Smith, then aged 46, was jailed for life for murdering Claire Tiltman. He had first been questioned about her murder in 1995, the same year that he committed the second of the two stabbings for which he was convicted in 1996. He was charged on the day he was due to be considered for release by the parole board, having served 18 years of a life sentence for the two previous attacks on women. He was told he would spend a minimum of 21 years behind bars by Mr Justice Sweeney. [12] [2] A number of Claire's school friends were in the gallery to hear the sentencing. [2] Following his conviction, detectives branded Ash-Smith as 'pure evil' and said he should never be freed. [10] Jaswant Narwal, CPS South East Chief Crown Prosecutor, called the case "one of the most complex cases" CPS South East has dealt with in recent years. [13]
In the years following her death, Tiltman's parents Clifford and Lin made regular appeals to the media and public for information leading a conviction in the years following her murder. However, they both died before Ash-Smith was charged and convicted. Her mother died in March 2008 at the age of 56, and her father died in September 2012 at the age of 63, both from cancer. They had no other children. Roger Tiltman, the brother of Clifford, said that his brother and sister-in-law were racked with guilt at her killing and the stress of it drove them both to early graves. In a victim impact statement, her uncle said: "The fact they allowed her out on the night of her death caused them a massive amount of pain.” [10]
Ash-Smith was already a known violent offender, and was first identified as a suspect in the murder of Claire Tiltman almost 20 years before he was finally convicted. [2] In December 1988, he had tried to rape and murder a young mother in a quarry. In October 1995, he stabbed 22-year-old Charlotte Barnard 14 times, close to where he had killed Claire nearly three years earlier. [14] He denied attacking Claire, and had attended his victim's funeral a month after the killing with his Labour councillor parents, wearing the same beige jacket he had worn on the night of the murder. [10]
Colin Ash-Smith (born 1968) was the only child of Aubrey and Diane Ash-Smith,. [15] He was aged 24 at the time of Tiltman's murder, and working locally as a milkman, and still lived with his parents at their home in Swanscombe. According to the CPS, Ash-Smith developed a pattern after the murder and set up false alibis on four occasions as well as increasing the ferocity and severity in his attacks. [13] He is currently imprisoned at HMP Durham. [16]
His mother, Diane, was a former Labour Party councillor and later mayor. [14] [17] She told police that he had been driving her home at the time of the attack on Claire. [10] In 1997 she said neither she, her husband, or son had had anything to do with Claire's killing.
His father Aubrey, who died in May 2016, had also served as a Labour Party councillor, but was jailed for 12 months in 1997 for perverting the course of justice. He had destroyed a knife just before the family home was due to be searched by police. He had admitted he boiled, dismantled and threw away a knife to destroy evidence. [2] Colin was denied a Special Purpose Licence to attend his father's funeral after news that he could potentially be allowed a temporary release to do so was met with public outcry on social media. [16] Instead he was allowed to send a floral tribute. [15]
In November 2015, Ash-Smith launched an appeal against his conviction on the grounds that Mr Justice Sweeney had wrongly allowed "gravely prejudicial" material to go before the jury. However, it was rejected by Lord Justice Davis and two other Lords Justice of Appeal. [18] [19]
Ash-Smith's conviction was among the cases featured in the BBC Four three-part documentary The Prosecutors, which showcases the CPS's work and the legal procedures behind a prosecution. [20] [21] The documentary was commended by the Radio Times as well as one of Tiltman's school friends who had testified at Ash-Smith's trial. [22] [23]
In 2018, a documentary on Tiltman's case was released as part of Crime + Investigation's series Murdertown. The episode, the second episode of series one, was titled "Dartford". [1]
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is the principal public agency for conducting criminal prosecutions in England and Wales. It is headed by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The murder of Wendy Sewell was committed on 12 September 1973. Wendy Sewell, a 32-year-old legal secretary from Bakewell, Peak District in Derbyshire was found beaten, sexually assaulted and murdered. In 1974, 17-year-old Stephen Downing was convicted of the murder of Sewell. Following a campaign by a local newspaper led by Don Hale, in which Sewell was purported to be promiscuous, Downing's conviction was overturned in 2002. The case is thought to be the longest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, and attracted international media attention.
Michael Stone was convicted of the 1996 murders of Lin and Megan Russell and the attempted murder of Josie Russell. He was sentenced to three life sentences with a tariff of 25 years for the Russell killings.
Kirk Noble Bloodsworth is a former Maryland waterman and the first American sentenced to death to be exonerated post-conviction by DNA testing.
HM Prison Durham is a Georgian era reception Category B men's prison, located in the Elvet area of Durham in County Durham, England. Built in 1819, the prison is operated by His Majesty's Prison Service. Its women prisoners were all moved out to other prisons in 2005 due to overcrowding and suicides.
Levi Bellfield is an English serial killer, sex offender, rapist, kidnapper, and burglar. He was found guilty on 25 February 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 23 June 2011, Bellfield was further found guilty of the murder of Milly Dowler. On both occasions, the judge imposed a whole life order, meaning that Bellfield will serve the sentence without the possibility of parole. Bellfield was the first prisoner in history to have received two whole life orders.
Arlene Fraser was a 33-year-old woman from Elgin in Moray, Scotland, who vanished from her home on 28 April 1998 after her two children went to school. No trace of her was ever found, but her husband was convicted of her murder, upheld on appeal.
David Groves, better known by his birth name Patrick David Mackay, is a British serial killer who is believed to be one of the United Kingdom's most prolific serial murderers.
Nazir Afzal is a British solicitor and former prosecutor within the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Ryan W. Ferguson is an American man who spent nearly 10 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the murder, Ferguson was a 17-year-old high-school student.
Stephen John Port is a British serial killer and serial rapist. He has been convicted of the murder of four young men and multiple rapes and sexual assaults of a number of others. Port received a sentence of life imprisonment with a whole life order on 25 November 2016.
Edward Francis Trevenen Brown KC is an English barrister who specialises in international criminal law and human rights. He is one of the most senior prosecutors at the Old Bailey where he also served as a Recorder, as well as sitting as a part-time circuit judge at Southwark Crown Court. Brown has written extensively on gang violence and joint enterprise murder in The Times.
David Smith is an English repeat murderer, rapist and suspected serial killer who came to national prominence in 1999 when he was convicted of murdering a sex worker six years after having been acquitted of an "almost identical" murder. Cleared of the murder of 33-year-old west London sex worker Sarah Crump in 1993, Smith was found guilty in 1999 of the killing of 21-year-old Paddington sex worker Amanda Walker. Smith has since been linked to a number of other murders of sex workers across Britain.
Sharon Louise Carr, also known as "The Devil's Daughter", is a British woman who, in June 1992, aged 12, murdered 18-year-old Katie Rackliff at random as the latter walked home from a nightclub in Camberley, Surrey, England.
Lorraine Thorpe is a British woman who is Britain's youngest female double murderer. Over the space of nine days in August 2009, Thorpe tortured and murdered two people in Ipswich, one of which was her own father. She came to national attention upon her conviction in 2010, when it was noted that she had only been 15 years old at the time of the killings. She was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 14 years' imprisonment, while her accomplice in the murders was issued with a 27-year minimum tariff. She remains imprisoned at HM Prison Foston Hall, having been refused parole in October 2023.
Michael Weir is a British double murderer and serial burglar who was the first person in English legal history to have been convicted of the same crime twice. In 1999, he was jailed for the murder of 78-year-old war veteran Leonard Harris. Weir's conviction was quashed a year later at the Court of Appeal on a technicality, only for him to be re-convicted in 2019 in a 'double jeopardy' case after new evidence was found. Weir was also convicted in 2019 of the murder of 83-year-old Rose Seferian, who was also killed during a burglary five weeks after Harris, which made additional history as the first time a second murder charge was added to a double jeopardy case. Upon Weir's conviction at the Old Bailey in December 2019, Justice Maura McGowan told the jury that they had made "legal history".
Colin Frederick Campbell is a British double murderer who in the early 1980s abducted two separate and unrelated women in west London and killed them in sexually motivated attacks. In 2013, 32 years after the event, Campbell was convicted of the high-profile unsolved murder of 17-year-old Claire Woolterton after a DNA match was found to him. He was already in prison for the 1984 killing of Deirdre Sainsbury, but had had his murder conviction in this case downgraded to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility in 1999 after he claimed that he had only killed her due to having an epileptic fit.
