A prisoner has been found guilty of murdering ‘Britain’s worst paedophile’ in an attack he said was ‘poetic justice’ for the children he abused.
Paul Fitzgerald, 30, said he wanted Richard Huckle to feel what his victims had felt after strangling him with an electrical cable sheath, inserting a pen into his brain and penetrating his anus and lower bowel with a blunt object.
It took jurors at Hull Crown Court took around an hour to convict Fitzgerald of murder after a four-day trial.
Opening the case last week, Alistair MacDonald QC said the attack in October 2019 was designed to ‘humiliate and degrade’ Huckle who was serving 22 life sentences for abusing nearly 200 children.
The prosecutor said Huckle was a ‘predatory paedophile’ who was ‘notorious in the press’ and had been extradited and tried in the UK for a large number of child sexual assaults.
Mr MacDonald said Fitzgerald told doctors he had sexually assaulted Huckle, even though he did not find him sexually attractive.
The barrister said: ‘He felt that it was poetic justice and he wanted Richard Huckle to feel what all those children had felt.
‘He said that Richard Huckle was a man who raped and abused children for fun and that he suspected that Richard Huckle had done more than merely rape his victims.
‘The insertion of an object into his anus, and possibly into his brain as well, was, say the prosecution, a form of punishment associated with the offending which had led Mr Huckle to prison.’
The court heard Fitzgerald took a number of objects to Huckle’s cell at HMP Full Sutton, including weapons he had made himself, such as a melted toothbrush with a screw inside, and items used to bind Huckle’s hands and feet.
Mr MacDonald said: ‘This was a carefully planned and executed attack, in the course of which Mr Huckle had been subjected to a prolonged attack also designed to humiliate and degrade him.’
He said Fitzgerald told staff after the attack at the East Yorkshire prison that he ‘enjoyed’ it and would have gone on to kill other inmates but he was ‘having too much fun’.
He also said he had ‘murdered Mr Huckle in cold blood’ and would like to have cooked bits of his body.
Fitzgerald denied murder and said his medical conditions – including mixed personality disorder, psychopathy and gender identity disorder – had impaired his ability to exercise self-control.
The court heard on Monday that the defendant said he had ‘constant ruminations’ in his mind about torture, rape and murder, and said: ‘My problem is I just don’t have the ability to control myself.
‘I don’t have the ability to look at people and see them as human beings. I don’t value them, I don’t care about them.
‘I don’t feel bad about hurting people, I don’t have the capacity to feel remorse.’
He is due to be sentenced at Hull Crown Court later today.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/24/prisoner-who-raped-and-strangled-paedophile-richard-huckle-guilty-of-murder-13644347/