James Crossley murder: Accused Julie Ann McIlwaine waited until partner was sleeping before stabbing him, court told

The Coleraine Crown Court jury also heard that in the aftermath of Julie Ann McIlwaine stabbing James Crossley on 2 March 2022, police heard the 33-year-old telling her neighbours: “He’s torturing me, I have had enough, I waited until he was asleep and then stabbed him.”

Prosecuting KC Richard Weir told the five men and eight women that 33-year-old McIlwaine “later said ‘what have I done’” and when she was told her 38-year-old partner had died in hospital, she declared “please God no” and was physically sick.

McIlwaine, from Hazel Close in the Lagmore area of west Belfast, is charged that on 2 March 2022, she murdered James Joseph Crossley.

The 38-year-old victim sustained fatal stab wounds at McIlwaine’s former home in Filbert Drive and formally opening the Crown case today, Mr Weir told the jury there was broad agreement about the facts of the case but they would have to decide whether the defendant had suffered a loss of control.

He said while trial judge Mr Justice Kinney would explain the minutiae of the legal defence “much more exquisitely than I have,” he told them the defendant would have satisfy them that her “acts and omissions in doing or being party to the killing resulted from the defendant’s loss of control, the loss of self-control had a qualifying trigger and whether a person of the defendant’s sex and age, with a normal degree of tolerance and self-restraint and in the circumstances of the defendant might have acted in the same way.”

Mr Weir told the jury that if they were so satisfied, “that leads to a verdict of manslaughter.”

Turning to the backgrounds facts of what happened, the senior barrister described how it was defendant herself who made a 999 call at 23.47, telling the operator that she had “locked herself in the downstairs bathroom with her baby and that she had stabbed her boyfriend at least six times.”

The call handler advised her to seek help from a neighbour and Mr Weir told the jury they would hear evidence that McIlwaine was banging and “screaming” at her neighbour’s door and when they opened it, they saw she was “covered in blood” and she told them “I’ve stabbed him.”

The 999 operator told the neighbour to go next door and when he did, he saw Mr Crossley “lying on the floor, on all fours and he described how there was blood all over him.”

McIlwaine told her neighbours “he’s torturing me, I have had enough, I waited until he was sleeping and then I stabbed him” and she also kept asking “is he dead, is he dead.”

Mr Weir said McIlwaine also told them Mr Crossley was forcing her to choose “between her family and me, that’s what he said to her.”

“Mr Crossley had sustained a number of stab wounds and had lost as great deal of blood,” the senior barrister told the court, adding that despite the “best efforts” of police and paramedics at the scene and emergency doctors at the RVH, the victim was sadly pronounced dead at 00.48, just over an hour since the initial 999 call.

A most mortem examination found that the cause of death was seven stab wounds to his chest and abdomen and further that the wounds were consistent with a knife found in the bedroom, a knife which matched similar knives in a block of knives in the kitchen.

McIlwaine spoke to police at the scene and she told them how the couple had reconciled the previous January but since that time, Mr Crossley had allegedly been abusive to her and was “making her choose between her family and him.”

She told police “it was like premeditated…I knew what I was doing…I couldn’t take it any more…he is a horrible person.”

During later interviews with detectives McIlwaine claimed her dead partner had been subjecting her to “mental torture,” had threatened to reveal the rekindling of the relationship to her family and that “she would not see her children again.”

While the defence case is that the killing resulted from a loss of control, Mr Weir submitted that “we say when you have heard all of the evidence in this case, you will be satisfied to the requisite standard that she murdered James Crossley.”

The trial continues.

At hearing.