[2025] EWCA Crim 1240

This is an application by His Majesty's Solicitor General for leave to refer a sentence to this court under section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 with a view to its being increased on the ground that it was unduly lenient.

There were two counts on the indictment. The second charged murder; the first was an allegation of a sexual offence against a victim who remains alive. We will not name that person in this judgment. We record at the outset that she is entitled to anonymity which is lifelong under the provisions of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992.

The offender, Harrison Lawrence Van Pooss, is now 21 years old. On 17 December 2024 he pleaded guilty to count 2 (murder) and also to count 1, which charged an offence of operating equipment under clothing to observe another, contrary to section 67(A)(1) and (4) of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. That offence resulted in a concurrent sentence of one month's imprisonment. It is only important as part of the factual background against which the dreadful offence charged in count 2 was committed. We shall say no more about what became of count 1 and will only refer to the facts briefly as part of the history.

On 28 February 2025, in the Crown Court at Canterbury, the offender was sentenced by Garnham J to life imprisonment for the murder, with a minimum term of 24 years and 47 days. Other orders were made on which nothing now turns.

In summary, the offender committed a serious sexual assault against the victim of the murder and then brutally murdered her. He had encountered her when she was on her own in a rural area, where there was nobody nearby to help her. She was walking back from the sea after swimming. After the violent and lethal attack, he disposed of her body into water while she was still alive, so that drowning was a partial cause of death. The other physical injuries which she had sustained must inevitably have meant that at least by that stage she was unconscious.

It is necessary for the purposes of this judgment to explain some of the facts in further detail, and also to identify the course of the proceedings and the psychiatric evidence which was gathered by the parties prior to the guilty plea being entered. That will make this judgment longer than is ideal, but in the circumstances of this case it is necessary.

In 2023 the offender was employed as a chef at a public house in Kent. In August 2023, he approached the bar in the pub where a female assistant manager was standing. She realised that he was using his mobile phone to photograph her up her skirt. CCTV footage was examined and that revealed that this had happened on three occasions. The offender was immediately dismissed from his job and the police were called. These events appear to have acted as a trigger for the events which were about to take place.

The offender went home. He packed up a backpack, which included a chef's knife. He went to ground. He built a den for himself not far from the scene where the murder was to take place.

In the early afternoon of the following day, Claire Knights went swimming with her dog in the sea near where the offender was to be found. At about 4.30 pm she was seen by a neighbour heading back towards her car, walking along an isolated track. There, tragically, she encountered the offender.

The judge's careful and detailed sentencing remarks explain what happened next. He said:

The judge then described the assault which followed that sexual assault. He said that it was merciless. It involved repeated blows to the head which caused catastrophic brain injuries. The judge thought that the first blows were probably inflicted by the offender using his fists; but he found that, once she had fallen to the ground, the offender stamped on her head. Those injuries, taken together, resulted in severe injury and almost immediate loss of consciousness. The judge then recorded the pathologist's evidence which detailed some of those serious facial, skull and brain injuries.

The judge went on to make this finding:

Having committed that assault against Ms Knights, the offender placed her body in the nearby dyke, in a location where it would be difficult to find. He disposed of her bloodstained possessions and his own knife. He went to buy bleach, before disposing of his own clothing, leaving his boots close to the location of the body and taking off his underwear in the den which he had created for himself. He began to make telephone calls to his partner in which he gave the impression that he was incoherent and that he did not know where he was or what he was doing.

He was arrested later that evening on suspicion of the offence which became count 1. Ms Knights' body was not found for two days after that, following which the offender was arrested on suspicion of murder. When he was charged, and under caution, he accepted that he was the person who had killed Ms Knights.

The offender has no previous convictions or cautions.

We turn to the history of the proceedings. The first appearance before the Crown Court took place on 20 September 2023. The court was told that the offender had been transferred to a mental hospital and that it would be necessary to obtain psychiatric reports. There followed a lengthy series of psychiatric and psychological examinations and reports which were gathered over a period of over a year following that first appearance.

The evidence soon suggested that there was a possibility at least that the offender was malingering or exaggerating a psychotic presentation, seeking some "secondary gain" (as it was put by the psychiatrists). In the context of a person in the position of the offender awaiting trial for murder, the nature of that secondary gain is obvious. A person whose responsibility for a killing is diminished by reason of an abnormality of the functioning of the mind is entitled to a verdict of manslaughter, rather than a verdict of murder.

In those early days, the offender had reported symptoms of what he believed to be psychosis, and those symptoms were accepted at face value by some clinicians for the purposes of treatment.

By February 2024 it was accepted, on the basis of the medical evidence then available, that the offender was fit to plead. He did not deny the offence, although he said that he had no memory of it.

In about March 2024, he told Dr Rogers that he had developed a false memory about a dog and being told that he should step on the grass. Dr Rogers said:

Another psychiatrist, Dr Brown, prepared a series of reports in which she considered that the available evidence casts doubt over the offender having suffered from a psychotic illness at the material time, but she did not feel able to confirm or to rule out other differential diagnoses as at May 2024.

In the same month, Dr Blackwood, who had been instructed by the prosecution, reported that he did not believe that the offender had any psychiatric defence available to him, but did accept that he was suffering from a borderline personality disorder.

Dr Murphy also examined the offender. He received an account, which later was repeated and recorded in a Defence Statement served on the prosecution and the court, in which the offender said that the deceased had made sexual advances to him and that he did not remember any other details, apart from that.

In the Defence Statement served sometime later, the offender alleged that voices had told him to kill Ms Knights at that point.

The case was originally listed for trial in June 2024. That trial was adjourned, because the medical picture was complex, evolving and unclear. The trial was refixed for 3 March 2025.

Dr Brown's further report, dated 12 November 2024, diagnosed a severe personality disorder. She thought that the offender had suffered serious trauma in childhood and that these stressful events were relevant in provoking the killing. She said:

It is fair to record that Dr Johal, a clinical psychologist, had administered a test which was designed to ascertain whether there was psychological evidence of malingering in the offender's presentation. That assessment did not provide evidence of malingering and was consistent with the offender's presentation at that stage being genuine.

By this stage, in late 2024, no doctor was willing to support a defence of diminished responsibility. The offender was re-arraigned on 17 December 2024 and entered the pleas to which we have already referred.

The sentencing hearing took place over two days, on 27 and 28 February 2025. The court received some of the most moving victim personal statements which this court has encountered. They came from Annie Watson (Claire Knights' younger sister); from her son, Elliot Sloane-Knights; and her brother, David Knights. Stuart Hulme (Ms Knights' partner) supplied a moving impact statement in which he described the dreadful consequences of his loss to him.

The sentencing hearing took as long as it did because it was necessary for the judge to examine with care the very substantial amount of psychological and psychiatric evidence which had been provided to him. We have briefly summarised only some of that and quoted selectively from it. That is sufficient for our purposes, because the judge made findings of fact which he set out with great care in his sentencing remarks. No one has suggested that he made any error in his findings of fact which should cause us to approach the case on any different factual basis from that which he found. He said this:

The judge referred to the account given to Dr Murphy, which was later summarised and set out in the Defence Statement, in this context. He said that this involved, as late as May 2024, a fabricated narrative of events which might provide an explanation as to how the offender's DNA came to be found on vaginal swabs. The judge described that account as "untrue, outrageous and designed to provide you with an unmerited defence".

The judge's conclusion about the offender's mental state was that the personality disorder, which he had described, marginally affected the offender's ability to exercise self-control "although you retained much of that ability". The judge said that this justified a "modest reduction" in his assessment of the offender's culpability.