Grisly details emerge about death of 'worst pedophile' in prison
WARNING - DISTRESSING DETAILS: A prisoner branded “Britain’s worst paedophile” was strangled to death and stabbed in the brain by a fellow inmate who considered the attack “poetic justice”, a court has heard.
Paul Fitzgerald, 30, choked Richard Huckle with an electrical cable sheath in a “prolonged attack designed to humiliate and degrade him”, jurors at Hull Crown Court were told on Wednesday (local time).
Another inmate found Fitzgerald “straddling” Huckle, who lay in a pool of blood, in the latter’s cell at HMP Full Sutton, in East Yorkshire, a prosecutor told the court.
Huckle was jailed for 22 life sentences in 2016 for a range of offences against 191 children aged as young as six months.
He said online that he would target impoverished children in Malaysia, which he found to be easier than going after wealthier Western youngsters.
Huckle was arrested when he arrived back in the UK from Australia in 2014.
The extent of his crimes led to him being dubbed “Britain’s worst paedophile” in the media.
Alistair MacDonald QC, prosecuting, said the prisoner was “notorious in the press... he was what was called a predatory paedophile”.
He said prison staff found Huckle gagged and bound with a ligature around his neck in October 2019, and found that he had been assaulted with a blunt object and received multiple blows to the face, and at least one to the kidney area.
His neck had been stabbed with a weapon made by adding a screw into a melted toothbrush, the court heard.
Jurors were told that Fitzgerald said he “murdered Mr Huckle in cold blood” and wanted to cook bits of his body.
“He said he enjoyed what he was doing to the body of Mr Huckle and that he would have gone on to kill two or three others,” MacDonald said.
He added that Fitzgerald told doctors he sexually assaulted Huckle and “felt that it was poetic justice and he wanted Richard Huckle to feel what all those children had felt”.
Jurors have been told that Fitzgerald denies the murder of Huckle, but accepts he killed him by reason of diminished responsibility.
The trial continues.
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