The Horrific Torture Murder of Kelly Anne Bates

The body of a seventeen-year-old was discovered in her bedroom with her eyes missing and over 150 wounds to her body.

Kelly Anne Bates was described as sporty and social, an outgoing girl who gave her brothers as good as she got. That all changed in her mid-teens. Slowly but noticeably, Kelly Anne began disappearing for nights from her home and became more withdrawn. It wasn’t until much later that her personality shift was understood to be caused by James Patterson Smith.

In 1993, when Kelly Anne was just fourteen years old, she met Smith while walking home from babysitting for friends; Smith claimed he walked her to keep her safe. At the time, he was in his mid-forties, and it’s believed he had every intention of making Kelly Anne one of his next girlfriends to abuse.

Two years after meeting, Smith had groomed Kelly Anne into a relationship. The only contact that Kelly’s mother, Margaret Bates, had with her daughter’s first boyfriend throughout those years were a few phone calls. That was until the end of 1995 when she returned to the Bates family home in Hattersley, England.

Kelly Anne was in the kitchen when Margaret entered, but before they could begin to talk, Smith sauntered into the kitchen. “This wasn’t the man I wanted for my daughter. I vividly recall seeing our bread knife in the kitchen and wanting to pick it up and stab him in the back,” Margaret said in a later interview.

Not long after the meeting, Kelly Anne had moved in with Smith, only coming back home after an argument before she went back to him. On the rare times she did return home, it’s reported that she would have bruises on her that Kelly Anne would explain away due to various accidents. She promised to remain in contact with her parents after the move but stopped seeing them at the end of November 1995 after moving into a home on Furnival Road. She would call them every week or so but never let on anything was a miss.

The following month, Kelly Anne resigned from her part-time job, further withdrawing from the things in her life that she had found joy in.

March 1996, the Bates parents received cards reportedly from Kelly for their anniversary and one of their birthdays, but only Smith had written in them.

On April 16th 1996, Smith reported to the authorities that his girlfriend had died while arguing. She was in the bath, and he claimed she inhaled water and died despite attempts at resuscitation.

When police arrived at the house, they found Kelly Anne nude in one of the bedrooms; her blood was all throughout the house. Very quickly, the police realised that it wasn’t as simple as an accidental drowning. An investigation throughout the house revealed pieces of hair tied around furniture and radiators, indicating that Kelly Anne was bound to the objects by her hair when a ligature around her neck tied her.

The most evidence of what happened to Kelly Anne in the house of horrors came from Dr. William Lawler’s post-mortem examination. He found over 150 separate injuries on her body that originated over the last month of her life. He said, “In my career, I have examined almost 600 victims of homicide, but I have never come across injuries so extensive.”. She had been starved and lost around 20 kilograms in weight; she was severely dehydrated and hadn’t had water in several days.

Some of the injuries that Kelly sustained were:

• Scalding to her buttocks and left leg.
• Burns on her thigh caused by a hot iron
• A fractured arm.
• Multiple stab wounds from knives, forks and scissors — to legs, torso and inside of her mouth
• Crush injuries to both hands and feet.
• Mutilation of her ears, nose, eyebrows, mouth, lips and genitalia.
• Wounds caused by a spade and pruning shears
• Both her eyes were gouged out — “not less than five days and not more than three weeks before her death” — after which she was stabbed in the empty eye sockets.
• Partial scalping.

Before she was drowned in the bath, Kelly Anne was beaten around the head with the showerhead, possibly to the point of unconsciousness. This is only speculation since when Smith reported to the authorities that Kelly Anne had died, she had a habit of feigning unconsciousness.

At trial, Peter Openshaw from the prosecution team said, “It was as if he deliberately disfigured her, causing her the utmost pain, distress and degradation,” — “ The injuries were not the result of one sudden eruption of violence; they must have been caused over a long period [and] were so extensive and so terrible that the defendant must have deliberately and systematically tortured the girl.”

Smith denied murder and claimed that Kelly Anne “would put me through hell winding me up”, and he claimed she would “taunt” him about his dead mother. He also tried to say that Kelly Anne had “a bad habit of hurting herself to make it look worse on me.”. Smith when asked why he blinded, stabbed and battered Kelly Anne, said that she had dared him to do it.

A consultant psychiatrist, Gillian Mezey, told the court that Smith had “a severe paranoid disorder with morbid jealousy” and lived in a “distorted reality.”.

It was also found Smith had a history of abusing his romantic partners, and many women came forward to make sure Smith was punished.

His first marriage ended after ten years in 1980 because of violence towards his wife.

The following relationship began shortly after with twenty-year-old Tina Watson, which lasted two years. The entire time, Tina was “used as a punch-bag” and was subjected to serve beatings while pregnant with their child. She said: “At first it was now and again; just a little tap. But in the end it was every day. He would smack me in the face or hit me over the head with an ashtray. He would kick me in the legs or between the legs.”. Smith, at one point, tried drowning Tina in the bathtub. She escaped with their child before it got any worse.

Soon after the relationship ended in 1982, Smith began grooming fifteen-year-old Wendy Mottershead. Like the others, Smith abused the teenager, at one point holding her head underwater in the kitchen sink to attempt to drown her. It’s unclear when that relationship ended.

It took a jury one hour to find forty-nine-year-old Smith guilty of murder. The judge overseeing the case, Mr. Justice Sachs, recommended that Smith serve at least twenty years of his life sentence; he stated, “This has been a terrible case; a catalogue of depravity by one human being upon another. You are a highly dangerous person. You are an abuser of women and I intend, so far as it is in my power, that you will abuse no more.”

That is all for this sickening case; thank you for reading Kelly Anne’s story.