Becky Watts: the fruitless search for answers

It didn’t take long after the verdicts were read out in Bristol Crown Court that the stories about Nathan Matthews, guilty of murdering his step-sister Becky Watts, started raining down.

As the usher was still stacking the plastic cups and straightening the chairs inside the empty courtroom while the family were facing the wall of cameras outside on Small Street, every news outlet in the country pressed publish on their versions of the cold-blooded killer’s profile.

“Nathan Matthews – a paranoid pervert who showed no sign of remorse”, said the Bristol Post. “How porn-obsessed recluse Nathan Matthews let sick fantasies overtake him,” another typical headline went from The Mirror.

By picking apart the five-week trial and adding every exclusive interview with every family member, friend, former boss or teacher which had been gathered since Becky went missing February, journalists and publishers tried their best to make sense of what happened and – most importantly – why it happened.

But the truth behind the motive of one of the most sensational, graphic and frankly incomprehensible murder trials the UK has seen in recent years is that there is no truth. There is no simple answer.

Matthews always denied murdering 16-year-old Becky, repeating over and over, both in police interview and in painful and teary moments in the witness box, that he only wanted to kidnap her and “teach her a lesson” for how she disrespected his mother (her step-mother).

But the prosecution painted a picture of a man with an “unhealthy obsession” with teenage girls who hatched a “sexually motivated” plan with his partner to kidnap and murder the teenager, which ended in him cutting her up with a circular saw to hide the remains.

The jury only took three and a half hours to choose which account was more believable. But, even so, they barely got a glimpse into the mystery behind the motive.

The courtroom heard Matthews was brought up by his grandmother in Warmley. It was a normal childhood, he said, over two days leaning against the witness box and sobbing.

His mother Anjie Galsworthy, who developed multiple sclerosis, would visit occasionally to take him to school, but his dad, not named on his birth certificate, left when he was a baby.

She lived with Becky’s father Darren and Becky in Crown Hill, St George. Matthews was said to be jealous of his step-sister and angry with the way he treated his mother there.

“I don’t particularly like her… What annoys me is how she speaks to my mum,” he told police in interview. An explanation from a man who had just brutally suffocated a teenager and then meticulously dismembered her dead body.

Matthews joined the Territorial Army cadets at the age of 12 or 13. After school he went to study to be an electrician at City of Bristol College, passing the first year but failing the second.

He stayed on at the Territorial Army, but later quit that too, partly on account of his fibromyalgia, a rheumatic condition which he said gave him near constant pain.

He ended up working as a delivery driver for his local Chinese takeaway, Laws Kitchen, near to where he lived with his partner Shauna Hoare in Barton Hill.

Matthews met Hoare (found guilty of manslaughter) when she was just 15 and he was 22. She had been in and out of care all her life, through foster parents and supported accommodation.

Matthews was described as “controlling” in court and assaulted his partner in their Cotton Mill Lane home where they lived together.

He also admitted to having an unusual sexual relationship with Hoare, describing himself as “always sexually frustrated” and “bored” of sex with her. The couple had threesomes with a former flatmate of Hoare, which did not satisfy Matthews either.

Police found thousands of porn videos on Matthews’ computer. They also found a 17-minute video clip entitled “virgin teen gets raped in her own house”, showing an attacker placing his hand over the victim’s mouth.

This, along with Facebook and text messages with Hoare about kidnapping young girls, was enough to show the jury that Matthews did what he meant to do.

But what was heard in court and what filled the almost instant follow-up stories in the media, only went a short way to explaining the all-important “why?”.

Why would a man kill his step-sister in such a way? Why did a simple grudge turn into a such heinous crime? Why has he shown no remorse?

In court there was no psychological or psychiatric profiling of Matthews, who cowered, crying, for most of the five weeks of the trial and even the first hearing where journalists had scrambled outside the Magistrates’ Court to get their first glimpse of him.

Huge gaps in knowledge about Matthews remain from the trial, the police interviews and the countless press interviews (many of them pre-planned and at a price) which reveal very little.

One side of Becky’s family chose to avoid much of the media limelight from start to finish. Their statement, handed to the press through the police after the jury delivered their guilty verdicts, didn’t have to answer any prying questions.

“We want to forget and move on from the awful things about her dismemberment and give the dignity back to Becky, which was taken from her during her death,” it said, as the trial came to a close and headlines were being written.

“We do not want to be part of any distasteful process where people profit from her brutal murder.”