Murderer Mitchell's mother sued for £¼m over deadly caravan

The mother of teenage killer Luke Mitchell is being sued for £250,000 over the death of a man from carbon monoxide poisoning in a caravan.

Corinne Mitchell ran Scott's Caravans in partnership with her mother when it sold a second-hand caravan with a gas heater which allegedly had not been properly installed.

John McCafferty, 56, and his wife, Gwenneth, stayed in the caravan and were both poisoned. Mr McCafferty died, and his widow has taken a compensation case to the Court of Session in Edinburgh.

Yesterday, a judge rejected claims by lawyers for Mrs Mitchell that the action should not be decided by a jury because of its complexities.

Lord Stewart said he had not been persuaded that there was good reason for a judge rather than a jury to decide whether Scott's Caravans, of Mayfield Industrial Estate, Dalkeith, Midlothian, and the partners, Mrs Mitchell and Ruby Guetta, were liable for the accident and should pay damages. The caravan had been bought for 995 in 2006 by Mrs McCafferty's brother. She and her husband stayed overnight in the caravan in February 2007 at Drummohr, near Musselburgh.

Mr McCafferty lit the heater and during the night, carbon monoxide from the flue of the heater re-entered the caravan and both suffered poisoning.

Mrs McCafferty, 59, a bakery assistant, of Mayfield, Dalkeith, is suing for the grief and sorrow of losing her husband, and for her own physical injuries and the subsequent depression which she says she suffered.

She alleges in the action that, in spite of Scott's Caravans representations, the caravan had not been serviced and inspected prior to the sale, or, if it had been, the inspection and service had not identified and corrected a defect in the installation of the heater.

Scott's Caravans does not admit that a representation was made about the caravan having been fully serviced and inspected, but says it was the invariable practice for its engineers to carry out an inspection of a caravan before agreeing to offer it for sale, on behalf of a third party. Also, it was "the invariable practice for their engineers to inspect a caravan again prior to completing the sale".

In the preliminary hearing, counsel for Scott's Caravans argued that there was "special cause" for keeping the case before a judge alone, and not allowing a jury to consider it.

Scott's Caravans stated that it had carried out an inspection, and the question was whether it had done so properly, it was said.If the company had, it would have checked the heater installation and found that the installation had not been carried out properly.

Lord Stewart said: "Clearly this has to be a matter of impression, but my impression was that this case falls well short of the degree of technical complexity that would make a case unsuitable for trial by a jury." A date for the next hearing has yet to be fixed.

Luke Mitchell, now 22, was 14 when he murdered his girlfriend, Jodi Jones, 14, in woods at Dalkeith. He was ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years under a life sentence.