The fiancée of the City lawyer stabbed to death for his mobile phone will come face to face today with the two teenage robbers who were convicted yesterday of his murder.
Adele Eastman, 32, will reveal for the first time the suffering that she has endured since Thomas ap Rhys Pryce, the Cambridge graduate she had been due to marry in September, died after being stabbed repeatedly through the heart.
Her victim statement will be read to the Old Bailey before Donnel Carty, 19, and Delano Brown, 18, are sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge has to determine how long they will serve before they are considered for parole.
The lawyer’s parents issued a statement last night urging other young people not to carry knives. John and Estella ap Rhys Pryce, from Weybridge, Surrey, said: “We are pleased and grateful that justice has been done. The conviction for the murder of Tom, merely for a mobile phone and an Oyster card, was a callous and senseless crime.
“We hope that the sentences will send a message to other youths who are in the habit of carrying knives. It is imperative that we stamp out the current knife culture in our cities.”
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Carty and Brown showed no emotion as the jury delivered guilty verdicts at the end of the month-long trial. As members of their family sobbed in the public gallery, Carty and Brown embraced each other before being led to the cells.
The jury convicted them of robbing and murdering Mr ap Rhys Pryce, 31. The pair had admitted robbing Kurshid Ali 20 minutes earlier.
They were also found guilty of wounding one Tube passenger and stabbing another on December 23 last year.
Carty, from Kensal Green, and Brown, from Sudbury Hill, both in northwest London, blamed each other for the lawyer’s killing. They had spotted Mr ap Rhys Pryce walking home on January 12.
Carty whistled and nodded in his direction, signalling another potential victim. With a flying kick he knocked Mr ap Rhys Pryce to the ground and grabbed his mobile telephone. The lawyer put up a fight and one of his attackers stabbed him in the leg.
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Dropping his gloves and novel, the lawyer tried to run but the muggers quickly caught up with him and launched an even more ferocious attack. Mr ap Rhys Pryce suffered two stab wounds to the heart and slash marks to hands and face.
Police believe that the teenagers were more aggressive because they were acting without their usual gang. “As a gang they could rely on strength of numbers. In the absence of the others their response could only be extreme violence,” a senior police source said.
“The fact that no one had been killed before was pure luck.”
While Miss Eastman, a lawyer at Farrer & Co, had hoped to be able to tell the Old Bailey in person what impact the murder has had on her life, she will be told that for legal reasons, a court official will have to read her statement.
Mr ap Rhys Pryce’s parents, along with Miss Eastman, set up the Tom ap Rhys Pryce Memorial Trust to help to improve the educational prospects of disadvantaged children. It has raised nearly £1 million.
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Outside court Detective Inspector Teresa Defanis, the senior investigating officer, said: “In murdering Thomas ap Rhys Pryce, Carty and Brown ended the life of a man with so much to live for — a man embarking on a promising career, a man planning his future with the woman he loved, a man supported by a loving family.”