A young man who was obsessed with choking women during sex after seeing it done on a pornographic video killed his friend’s teenage girlfriend.
James Morton plied Hannah Pearson, 16, with alcohol at his home hours after they had met before “guiding” her to his bedroom, where he strangled her, Nottingham crown court was told.
After the schoolgirl stopped breathing Morton dialled 999 and she was taken to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Morton, 24, admitted putting Hannah, who had drunk so much that she was struggling to stand up, into bed and climbing in with her, then squeezing her throat until she was dead. He said that it happened by accident. He was curious about choking women after “seeing it on a film” and had tried it on a previous partner, but this time he got carried away.
After a two-week trial he was cleared of murder but found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for 12 years.
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Hannah, of Marston, Lincolnshire, had gone to meet her boyfriend, Jed Hope, in a pub in Lincoln on July 23 last year. Morton, a friend of Mr Hope’s, was at the pub when she arrived. It was the first time they had met. The three drank in the pub and bought more alcohol from a shop then Morton invited the couple to his house in Newark.
Mr Hope could not afford the train fare so Hannah, who had told her parents that she would be staying at a friend’s house, went alone to Morton’s.
Hannah’s mother, Dawn Pearson, read her own victim impact statement to the court in which she said:“Hannah was the most beautiful daughter you could ask for. The loss and pain we are all experiencing is indescribable. To have the police knock at your front door and tell you your daughter has been killed is a parent’s worst nightmare. This is the nightmare we are living with every single day.”
Passing sentence, Mrs Justice Carr, told Morton that Hannah was “very intoxicated and, if not totally unconscious, then certainly confused and not thinking straight. She was in no position to object, trapped underneath you whilst you strangled her.”
The judge added: “The pain suffered by [Hannah’s] family is indescribable”. Her death was a “shocking, event that should not have happened”.