from www.foxnews.com - A former football coach was sentenced to a life prison sentence after he was found guilty today of murdering a young model who named her killer with her dying words.
Amy Leigh Barnes, 19, dialled 999 as she lay fatally injured from multiple stab wounds inflicted with a kitchen knife by her violent boyfriend, Ricardo Morrison.
The aspiring actress, who had represented Britain in beauty pageants, told an emergency operator: “I can’t breathe. I’ve been stabbed. Please help me. I’m dying. He’s stabbed me to death.” Asked who had attacked her, she replied: “My boyfriend . . . I’m going . . . I can’t see.”
Morrison, 22, who denied murder, was convicted after an 11-day trial at Manchester Crown Court. He will serve a minimum of 24 years in jail. Clutching a Bible, he bowed his head, put one hand to his face and appeared to begin weeping when the verdict was given.
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Sentencing him, Mr Justice MacDuff said: “You are an evil man with nothing to commend you. You have a history of abusing and assaulting women. You are controlling and you do not like to be crossed. You do not take no for an answer.
“You had controlled and abused Amy Leigh Barnes over many months. Yours was a sustained campaign of prolonged physical, emotional and psychological abuse.”
After the murder, Morrison had he fled from the house in which the couple lived in Farnworth, near Bolton, to his mother’s home in Birmingham, where she allowed him to wash his bloodstained clothes.
Morrison’s mother, Melda Wilks, 50, a West Midlands police officer, who sat alongside her son in the dock, was found not guilty of assisting him to destroy vital forensic evidence.
Ms Wilks, a police constable for 29 years, told the court that she “was not thinking as a police officer but as a mother” when her son told her that he had not harmed his girlfriend.
During the trial, details emerged of a stormy ten-month relationship in which Morrison was regularly abusive and violent towards Miss Barnes.
The Hollyoaks extra had a reputation as a “party girl” and the jury heard that she was often seen in bars and clubs frequented by professional footballers. Morrison resented her close friendships with some of them and had attacked and threatened her on numerous occasions.
In a text message sent to a footballer friend days before her death, Miss Barnes described Morrison as “psycho”.
On the morning of her death last November, she texted another footballer to accuse Morrison of punching her, spraying aerosol in her mouth and slamming her arm in a door at her grandmother’s house, where they were living. When Morrison left the house after locking her inside, Miss Barnes phoned her mother and arranged for her father to go to the house and free her.
The court heard that she told her mother: “Will you come now? I just want to be at home. I have told him that he’s not going to control me any more.”
Her father, Andrew Barnes, set off but before he reached the house Morrison had returned and launched his fatal attack, slashing his girlfriend’s face and stabbing her nine times in the chest and back with a 6in knife.
Mr Barnes arrived minutes later to find his daughter lying unconscious in a pool of blood. “Walking through the door was the hardest day of my life,” he said. “No one should have to see that, not their little girl.”
Her phone still lay at the side of her body.
Miss Barnes died two hours later in hospital soon after her mother arrived to see her. Mrs Barnes described her daughter’s last minutes: “Nothing prepared me for what I saw, I don’t really want to talk about Amy’s injuries but they were horrific,” she said.
“She screamed and screamed. It was the last thing she said: she screamed, ‘I want to die'.”
