Man accused of murder ‘sickened by attic torture’

By LUCY CHRISTIE
Published on 15/02/2013 00:46

A MAN accused of murdering a missing financial adviser told a friend he was promised £10,000 to “babysit” a woman who was tortured in the attic at his flat, a court has heard.

Witness Sean Alexander told the High Court in Glasgow that suspect David Parker, 38, told him he was “sickened” by what he had become involved in.

Parker, Paul Smith, 47, Philip Wade, 42 and Colin Coats, also 42, deny torturing Lynda Spence before murdering her and burning items from the flat in West Kilbride, North Ayrshire, where she was allegedly held, in an ­attempt to escape justice.

Mr Alexander was questioned about conversations that he had with his friend who had been staying with him on and off around the time Ms Spence, 27, was allegedly abducted on 14 April 2011.

The 40-year-old, who is unemployed, said that sometime after 19 April, Parker told him that “it had got out of hand, that it wasn’t what he’d signed up for”.

“He said she’d been tortured. She’d been burned with cigarettes and an iron, hit with a golf club and either a toe or finger cut off or something,” Mr Alexander told the jury.

The trial heard earlier that a witness saw two men in a van matching one bought in Wade’s name dumping items and burning them following Ms Spence’s disappearance.

Retired Alistair McCallum, 60, told police investigating her disappearance on 1 July that year that he saw a yellow van at a property neighbouring his in Carsehead, North Ayrshire, about three weeks earlier.

He said he remembered “a van coming up and someone taking some stuff out and setting fire to it”.

The witness identified the van as yellow with the registration DU07 NKE, the same as a model that the jury heard had been bought from a car dealership in Wade’s name on 16 April 2011.

The trial, before Lord Pentland, continues.