Horrific Murder Case

On April 16, 1996, James Patterson Smith told police that his teenage girlfriend, Kelly Anne Bates, had accidentally drowned. But the horrible injuries they discovered on her body implied torture and killing far awful than they could ever imagine.

One day, Margaret Bates returned home to her house in Hattersley, England to find her 16-year-old daughter, Kelly Anne, standing in the kitchen. Unbeknownst to her mother, Kelly Anne had taken her boyfriend home for the first time. Next came the noise of footsteps on the stairs as the boyfriend, James Patterson Smith, stepped into the room.

Margaret was stunned to find that Smith was in his mid-40s. No mother would be pleased to learn that their daughter was dating someone so much aged than she was. But for Margaret, it went further than that. There was something deeply offending about Smith.

This wasn’t the man I wished for my daughter. I vividly recall seeing our bread knife in the kitchen and wanting to grab it up and stab him in the back,” she told in a later interview. Margaret would later regret her opinion not to stab Smith then and there — because her daughter’s connection with James Patterson Smith would soon end with him torturing and murdering her so brutally that the court gave the jurors at his trial with counselling afterwards.

The couple had met in 1993 when Kelly Anne Bates was just 14 and they’d been maintaining the affair greatly secret from her mother until that disastrous moment in the kitchen.

In November 1995, not long after the meeting in the kitchen, Kelly Anne moved in with the jobless Smith in nearby Gorton. Though sceptical of the decision, her parents decided on the condition that she keeps in normal contact. But over the next few months, their once outgoing daughter grew withdrawn. And when she stopped by for an unusual visit, her parents noticed abrasions on her arms.

James Patterson Smith had a big history of abusing the women he lived with. His first marriage ended in charges of physical violence. And other women Smith had dated told identical stories. He even once attempted to drown a 15-year-old girlfriend.

Smith was no different with Kelly Anne Bates and regularly whack her. But after a few months, the abuse escalated to a dreadful new level.

The true extent of the abuse only became obvious on April 16, 1996, when Smith stepped into the Gorton Police Station and said that he’d accidentally murdered Kelly Anne Bates after their argument while she was in the bath resulted in her to drown (how precisely he framed this as an accident to police stays unclear).

The pathologist who investigated the body discovered more than 150 injuries caused over at least a month. In the weeks leading up to her demise, Smith was hungering Bates and even kept her tied to a radiator by her hair. She had been burned with a hot iron, suffocated, and stabbed dozens of times in the legs, torso, and mouth. Smith had also disfigured her by slashing at her scalp, face, and genitals with several tools including snipping shears. He’d even gouged out her eyes — at least five days before he eventually killed her by drowning her in the tub.

The case went to prosecution, during which the prosecutors laid out the suffering Bates had endured for the jury. “The physical pain would have been intense,” one prosecutor said, “causing anguish and distress to the point of mental deterioration and collapse.”

At the prosecution, other women that Smith had harmed came forward to paint a picture of a misogynistic man who was obsessively envious and turned to turmoil to control others.

Meanwhile, Smith contended that he was a substantial victim. He claimed that Bates drove him to murder her by insulting him. “[She] put me through hell winding me up,” he said. He even argued that she caused some of her injuries herself to make him look bad.

But the jury didn’t buy it and shortly found 49-year-old James Patterson Smith guilty of killing Kelly Anne Bates. On Nov. 19, 1997, he was penalized to a minimum of 20 years in jail (some accounts say 25), where he stays to this day.

As for Margaret Bates, she still thinks back to that moment in the kitchen when she first met Smith. “It was an odd thought,” she said of her ambition to murder him right there, “I would never generally think of anything so brutal and now I wonder whether it was some kind of sixth sense.”