Charlotte Murray murder: Killer ‘deserves longer jail term because he hasn’t given up body’

Johnny Miller will find out next month how long of a life sentence he will serve in prison for the murder of Charlotte Murray.

Judge Stephen Fowler QC told Miller, convicted of Charlotte’s murder last year just weeks before the seventh anniversary of her disappearance, that he wished to reflect on his case before deciding on the appropriate tariff.

Prosecution QC Richard Weir told Dungannon Crown Court judge, sitting in Belfast, that his tariff should be at the higher starting point of 15 to 16 years, because of the aggravating factors.

Not least among those was Miller’s continued silence over the whereabouts of Charlotte’s remains, depriving her of the “respect and dignity of a burial and depriving her family of essential right of burying her”.

Mr Weir said that Charlotte was a vulnerable person, whose “total disappearance, total vanishing” by Miller, with its devastating and tragic consequences for the family, had three main aims, to evade capture, evade arrest and evade conviction.

However, defence QC Orlando Pownall, while accepting this may be an aggravating factor, given the prosecution case that Miller killed in a rage, and as such the killing could not have been pre-planned, and therefore the case fell within the normal starting point of 12 years.

The 49-year-old Co Tyrone chef, from Redford Park, Dungannon was unanimously convicted last October by a jury of eight men and four women at the end of a four-week trial of being the “cold calculating murderer” who killed his 34-year-old ex-fiancée Charlotte.

His trial heard that sometime between October 31 and November 2, 2012, he murdered Charlotte in a rage when she sent explicit images of herself in the arms of another man. It was, said prosecution QC Richard Weir, “the last straw ... a last humiliation...being shown to be a cuckold”.

Miller maintained that she simply left their Roxborough Heights, in The Moy, Co Tyrone, to take up a job in Belfast, leaving him her car, which he sold to pay off her debts to him, and her beloved dog Bella to look after.

In the aftermath of his conviction Charlotte’s identical twin sister Denise, appealed for Miller to do “the decent thing, the honourable thing and let us know where Charlotte’s body is, so we can bring her home”.