'Hugely talented': Lucy Braham pictured at work in her studio when she was still at school
Posted on 07/13/2007 9:43:17 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
'Hugely talented': Lucy Braham pictured at work in her studio when she was still at school
Old Harrovian William Jaggs, 23, stripped and then stabbed 25-year-old Lucy Braham 66 times at her home after she rejected his gift of a kitten.
The two were the children of masters at the public school and had known each other for over 20 years.
An Old Bailey judge accepted Jaggs's plea of guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and ordered he be detained indefinitely at Broadmoor maximum security hospital.
After the verdict, Lucy's father, who is art director at Harrow, accused senior masters of failing to deal with Jaggs's behaviour.
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Tragic: Lucy Braham on holiday in Mexico in 2006
The loner had been allowed to continue to live within the school's grounds after being suspended at the end of his second year at Oriel College, Oxford, for his continued drug-taking.
On September 14 last year, he butchered Lucy in the kitchen of her family home after she had spurned his sexual advances and rejected the offer of a kitten.
She suffered stab wounds to the chest, back, arms and legs as she fought for her life.
He severed her thumb with a pair of secateurs and then used a saw to try to cut her torso in half. The walls and floors were spattered with blood as he butchered her on the kitchen floor.
Brave: Lucy's father Jason Braham leaves the Old Bailey
Her lungs, intestine, liver and kidney were all punctured in the unrelenting, ferocious attack. A nextdoor neighbour alerted police after peering over the fence and seeing a pool of blood on the kitchen floor.
After killing her, Jaggs tried to take his own life, repeatedly stabbing himself in the chest.
'A sick mind': Old Harrovian William Jaggs
Police had to smash two windows to get into the kitchen and dragged him away from her body.
Lucy's parents arrived home from an evening out to find their street sealed off. They tried to call their daughter to say they couldn't get through, unaware that she had been hacked to death in their own home.
The news was broken to them as they stood at the police cordon. Their horror and grief was compounded when they discovered that her killer was the misfit from a few doors down.
Jaggs was taken to hospital and put in a medically-induced coma until he had recovered from his injuries.
Blood tests revealed that he had not been high on the day of the attack.
Lucy's friends and family in the public gallery sobbed and one man fainted as the prosecution read out the horrific and bloody events of the night she died.
Her parents, Jason and Julienne, and their daughter Alice, 31, bravely sat through the sickening evidence.
In an emotionally- charged impact statement read out in court, Lucy's father attacked "the despicable drugs fraternity" at Oxford and expressed his disbelief that Jaggs had developed his drug habit at one of the best public schools in the country.
In stark contrast to her neighbour, Lucy had been carving out a successful career for herself.
She had attended Chelsea School of Art where she completed a foundation course before getting a coveted place at the London College of Fashion.
Trigger: A kitten is carried away from the scene of the murder. At the inquest it was revealed that a clash over the kitten may have been the trigger for Jaggs' frenzied attack
At the time of her death, she was working from a studio in the family home, busily designing a range of clothing accessories with a friend and was about to launch an online fashion label.
Mr Braham described Jaggs, whose father Alan was head of design and technology at Harrow, as a "despicable human being".
He said: "Jaggs spat in the face of everyone who had given him his advantages - his parents, his teachers, and anyone who placed him in a position of trust. He treated his housemates at school with contempt.
"He was arrogant, dishonest and indecent and was found unsuitable to be in a boarding house.
"Weak-willed, emotionally immature, morally vacant and criminally inclined, he was ideal prey for the drug-dealer and the pornographer.
"He fitted readily into the despicable drugs fraternity at Oxford University.
"He was sent down for a year 'to sort himself out'. The extent to which he failed to do so is obvious. Already a thief before he arrived at Harrow, by Oxford he had descended from the gutter to the sewer.
"This disgrace of a human being reached the lowest depths on September 14 last year."
In his attack on Harrow, Mr Braham said: "It is worrying that he developed his drug habit at his boarding school.
Lucy Braham died of multiple stab wounds. She was 25
"Even if the habit only became apparent when he was no longer a pupil, the school is to be challenged for its failure to act, for, as the son of a master, he continued to live in the community."
Jaggs had been a prolific drugtaker since the age of 14 and his mind had been warped over the years by a cocktail of cocaine, heroin, crack and LSD, triggering paranoid schizophrenia.
Four days before he butchered Lucy, Jaggs turned up at the house of school friend Simon Macpherson with a chainsaw intent on killing him, but Macpherson was not in.
The day before the killing, he sent a deranged email to his tutor at Oxford in which he spoke of hearing voices in his head.
He confessed that he had stolen £300 from his mother's current account and spent half of it on drugs in one week.
At the end he wrote: "This is a paranoid delusional nightmare brought on by the use of drugs.
"I've only myself to blame but I'll have to live with it. I'm not frightened."
At Oxford he once brandished a knife at a girlfriend before tying her up and having sex with her.
He told another girlfriend at Oxford in a text message: "As you've correctly noted I'm a total psychopath. Have a nice day."
Staggeringly, his behaviour went unchecked by staff at Oxford and Harrow while his drug abuse escalated, sending him into an increasingly unstable mental state.
He had been charged with murder but four eminent psychiatrists all agreed that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
One doctor said his case offered a "chilling insight into a sick mind."
Mental health experts have concluded that he continues to pose and grave danger to others, in particular women.
Police fear that if he is ever freed he will kill again.
A statement from Harrow School said: "The school has been devastated by the death of Lucy and by the appalling consequences of her death for two families who contributed so much to our community over many years.'
The kitten he gave Lucy was recovered by police from the murder scene and handed back to Jaggs' parents.
Jaggs's father, Alan, has already left Harrow School which charged fees of £25,000 a year and the family have moved away.
He and his wife Stella have three other children, James, 21, Kathryn, 20, and Daniel, 12.
Mrs Jaggs and James sat in the public gallery to see her eldest son, now 23, sent to Broadmoor where he may stay for the rest of his life.
At present, Mr Braham continues to teach at Harrow and the family still live in the same house where Lucy died though they are expected to leave in the near future to try and put the memories of what happened that night behind them.
I thought that they banned pointy knives in Britain.
It’s prolly a misprint, as knives are illegal. I’ll bet they mean he stabbed her with the pointy end of a pillow, or something.
awwww.... poor kitty =(
But drugs are a victimless crime, didn’t you get the memo?
Prayers for the victim and her family.
Nutjob stripped naked, like this, broke through the basement wall in the rowhouse and slaughtered his next door neighbor lady.
Get a good handgun, learn how to use it and keep it handy.
It seems more and more typical that the ugly murders the beautiful. It’s like the victim’s beauty was an affront, or a reproach, to the ugliness of the murderer.
Damn! Why can't these freaks just off themselves and leave everyone else alone?!
Having once “shared” a marriage with a drug ingesting paranoid schizophrenic, this family has my undying sympathy. Praying that they will, somehow, survive this outrage.
EXACTLY! Why does it always occur to them to kill their ugly useless selves AFTER they have ruthlessly murdered some totally innocent human being (or beings)? WHY don’t they kill themselves BEFORE they kill someone else?!!!!
Please don’t blame the poor little animal for that sicko’s depravity. Yes, a human being is of infinite worth compared to an animal, but place the blame where it belongs, please.
"In stark contrast to her neighbour, Lucy had been carving out a successful career for herself."
The author has a sick sense of humor........
And yet the crime is blamed on drugs, the charge is softened to manslaughter, and he's detained "indefinitely" in a "hospital."
In England, they only send you to prison if you shoot somebody in self-defense during a home invasion. But if you murder and mutilate an unarmed girl in her home, you get handled with kid gloves.
Gotta wonder how much these geniuses are paid to state the obvious.
I'm sure that Mr. Jaggs will be issued a very stern warning not to do this again.
When the British judicial system cracks down on miscreants, they crack down!
Two thoughts: 1. Why is only the school to blame? Where were the parents through all this (he started drugs at 14). Boarding school does not alleviate the parents of responsibility.
2. They should have let him succeed in his efforts to kill himself. Woulda saved everybody a lot of trouble, since they knew that no significant punishment would be forthcoming.
Lucy Braham wasn't killed by drugs but by a man who was a nasty piece of work before he got involved in drugs. Do you think every person killed by a drunk driver is an argument for reviving Prohibition? (Now this part is a disgrace: "An Old Bailey judge accepted Jaggs's plea of guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility".)
And yet the crime is blamed on drugs
Good catch.
According to the article, his drug use began at age 14, which means of course, somehwere in the background is an adult who is providing drugs to children i.e victimizing them.
Drugs are no more victimless than alcohol and I have no problem with legalizing them on the same rationale that prohibition was ended (that the harm created by criminalization re: organized crime is greater than the harm caused by legalization).
I do worry that given the breakdown in society that legalizing recreational drugs will just further greenlight society’s descent into chaos because law and justice is already so weakened by socialism and humanism.
I doubt that legalization would either decrease or increase such cases as this, but it would be nice if legalization came with changes in the law that disallowed diminished capacity pleas and increased penalties for criminal acts committed under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
I just get tired of the pro-drug mantra that usage is a victimless crime when it is so demonstrably not true.
Oh, cut it out. The author made his point. He was simply trying to portray a slice of life at a private school. She really looked sharp in that picture.
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