**Episode Transcription
Welcome everyone! Welcome to a new episode of Love and Murder – the weekly true crime podcast discussing relationships gone terribly wrong. Where our motto is, you’re either someone’s last love or their first murder.
I am your host Ky and in today’s episode, we’re talking about a horrible case of pain, abuse, and murder.
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Unemployed divorcee James Smith lived in the Gorton area of Manchester, UK. James’s marriage ended in 1980 after ten years of marriage. Because he was an abusive, he’d often beat his wife and was just he was just very, very abusive. So his wife divorced him in 1980. He then went on to have another relationship with a woman who was 20 years old, and her name was Tina Watson. He was with her between 1980 and 1982. Again, and as is his norm, he was abusive with her.
According to Tina, he, quote, used her as a punching bag, even when she was pregnant with his child. That did not stop his abuse. He subjected her to, quote, severe beatings, end quote, while she was pregnant with his child. She said that, quote, 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, end quote. One day after James tried to drown her in her bathtub, pina left after she left in that same year, 1982, as the case files put it, james started seeing a 15 year old girl named Wendy Mattershead. Again, as is his norm, he was also abusive to Wendy once, and as he tried to do with Tina, he held Wendy’s head under the water in the kitchen sink, trying to drown her.
So apparently he has a thing about drowning women. I’m not really sure, but it’s looking like a pattern. He didn’t drown her. She was able to get away as well. Now, before we continue, I have a question. So this case is from the UK, and in some articles that I came across, they had some specific words. And being that I’m from the US, I guess I don’t know what these words mean. So this goes out to my UK lambs, if you could tell me what these words mean.
So one of the things that they said was house proud, what does that mean? And t totaler te totaler, what does that mean? So if you can tell me in the comments below or go to the website Murderandlove.com and shoot me an SOS, that’ll be very helpful. So, between 1982 and 1993, it does not appear that James was with anyone else. But in 1993, he met a 14 year old girl. So he’s regressing because last one was 15. I guess it was somebody his own age, then 20, then 15, now 14. So he met a 14 year old while she was babysitting for his friends. Kelly Anne Bates was born on May 18, 1978 in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, England, to Margaret and Tommy Bates. While growing up, Kelly was described as a tomboy who loved playing sports.
She wanted to become a teacher and she wanted to go to college to work in graphics as well. She was very ambitious in what she wanted to do. She was very headstrong, meaning in her goals. This is what I want to do. I want to be a teacher, I want to work in graphics. She loved children and she loved sports. Her mother said, quote, Kelly loved children and wanted to be a teacher. She was soft hearted and very maternal.
So how did she go about meeting James? Well, the day he met her babysitting his friend’s children, he decided to act like he was helping her. He wanted to walk her home and, quote, keep her safe, make sure know nobody would harm her. Little did she know that he was the harm. So of course, to Kelly, that seemed like a very novel idea. White knight, shining armor, all of that stuff. She’s only 14, after all. By the time Kelly had turned 15, she was, quote, seeing James one day. She stayed out overnight and her parents didn’t know.
So she didn’t tell her parents that she was staying out overnight and her parents panicked and called the police. The police said, obviously, you got to give it 24 hours, whatever. So when she finally came home the next morning, her parents were like, Where have you been? Where have you been? And she said she had stayed with one of her classmates named Rachel. Her mother said, quote, I knew she was lying, it wasn’t like her, but I had no idea what was going on. Kelly was a good girl as well as babysitting. She had a job on a market stall. On weekends, she played hockey. And she was clever at school.
She was hardworking and sensible, and I could never have dreamed she was being groomed by a monster. Soon after, Kelly revealed to her parents that she was dating a boy named Dave Smith. As the relationship progressed with Dave Smith, kelly’s parents realized that she came home quite often with bruises and bite marks on her. And they would ask her what’s going on? And she would also always say, oh, nothing, just playing around. Kelly, now 16, once came home just with a bunch of bruises all over her. And when asked what happened to her this time, she said that a gang of girls followed her after school and attacked her. One day, Kelly came home with a black eye. And when her parents asked her where did she get that black eye, she claimed that a group of girls followed her after school and attacked her.
This is where she got the black eye. And they asked her, okay, what about these bite marks? And she said, oh, that was an accident. Just playing around with my friends. I don’t know what friends bites you, but I gotta say, if one of my friends bites me hard enough to leave a mark, I think it’s gonna turn into more than just playing because I’m gonna hit her back. Now Kelly’s parents did speak with Dave over the phone, and I do see some reports that claim that they thought he was a 32 year old man, but they didn’t know his actual age. So after meeting Dave, not only did Kelly come home with bruises, start staying out, start just acting not like herself, she also stopped showering and would just lay on the couch for hours, curled up and just in complete silence. Quote, she came home and one side of her face was black. She said some girls had attacked her.
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I couldn’t bear the worry, but I knew if I dragged her away from him, I could lose her. During this time, her mother continuously called police and social services, but they continuously told her that Kelly was 16 and they couldn’t help her. Her mother says, quote, I didn’t know what to do. She was very strong minded and she wouldn’t listen to me. And I was worried that if I fell out with her, it would just push them closer together. One night, she came home with her face black and blue. Another time, her hand was bruised. I suspected Smith was hitting her, but Kellyanne denied it.
I rang the police, but they said there was nothing they could do without a statement from Kelly, end quote. Then one day in November 1995, kelly came home and told her parents, hey, I got a new job. So with this new job, I’m not going to be able to see you that much. And also I’m moving out. And so on November 30, 1995, she went ahead and moved out of her parents house and moved into a two bedroom semidetached house with David Smith. By this time, she was 17, and according to the law in England, she was not underage, and she could legally decide where she was going to live, who she was going to live with, what she wanted to do, and her parents had nothing to say about it. So when she first moved, she would call her parents every single day, and that later whittled down to maybe once a week. And they just noticed that their daughter was becoming more and more withdrawn.
So they decided to stop by for a visit, go to her know, we want to see our daughter. When they got to the house, they noticed that there were bruises on her arm, and they said that they wanted to meet this David Smith. So they waited for him to show up. And in the meantime, Kelly would just sit she was just sitting there looking quiet and well, not looking quiet. She was just sitting there quietly and looking nervous. And she had her, quote, head bowed. So basically, she was internally and externally withdrawn. So of their meeting with Dave Smith, this is what her mother says, quote, the first time I met him, he swaggered down the stairs, and it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
He was much older than I expected, and this wasn’t the man I wanted for my daughter. I vividly recall seeing our breadknife in the kitchen and wanted to pick it up and stab him in the back. It was a bizarre thought. I would never normally think of anything so violent. I’ve thought about that moment many times, end quote. I mean, I understand. Wow, mom went into mama bear protective mode. Dude, I could dig it.
Now Kelly ended up leaving Dave, so they still think his name is Dave. Kelly ended up leaving Dave Smith very shortly because she just couldn’t take the arguments with him anymore. And she moved in with her parents. And although that they tried to keep her know them, they didn’t want her moving back because there was bruises all over her that she kept just saying were accidents. But anybody I don’t just want to say parents, anybody would know that you weren’t accident prone before. Now you can’t stop bumping into everything from head to toe. That’s not normal. So although they knew, basically suspected knew literally, she’s telling them without telling them that this Dave Smith is continuously abusing her.
They couldn’t stop her when she left their house and went back to live with him. Her mother says, quote, in addition to worrying about Kelly ann, our youngest son Paul was in the hospital for weeks. And I had a hernia operation, too. So our lives were thrown into chaos. We even went round to Smith’s address to try to persuade her to come home, but he was there all the time. By December of 1995, Kelly Ann was so withdrawn that she quit her part time job. And in March of 1996, her parents got a card that was supposedly from Kelly for their anniversary and then another one for their birthday. But the weird thing about it is that only David had written on them, so there was nothing from Kelly.
And her mom said, quote, in April, I got a Mother’s Day card from Kelly in Smith’s handwriting, and I’d had enough, but I was torn. I didn’t want to keep going round there because I thought it was making things worse. It haunts me to think that if we had gone around there, she would be alive today. End quote.
Her mom said that throughout all of this, she kept calling the police, kept calling police domestic violence unit. And all that was said to her was that here’s some documents to read. Here’s some pamphlets to read. Give this to your daughter. One day, Kelly’s brother even tried to go to the house, and Dave Smith said that, oh, she’s not at home. And another time, when a neighbor that was concerned about her welfare asked about her, david told her to look upstairs.
By that I mean he said, look up. And he told Kelly to look outside. And basically, you just briefly saw Kelly’s face in the upstairs window, and that was it. On April 16, 1996, dave Smith walked into the Gorton police station and walked up to a police officer and said, hey, I accidentally killed my girlfriend, Kellyanne Bates. We were having an argument, and she was in the bathtub, and this argument just caused her to drown. I tried to resuscitate her, but I couldn’t. And I was kind of thinking that she was playing because she often pretends to be unconscious, but this time it doesn’t seem like she’s pretending. So, yeah, I think I accidentally killed her.
So police were like, okay, and where is she right now? And he said she’s still at the house, gave them the address, and when police arrived at the address, they found her naked and lifeless body on the bathroom floor. So now remember, he said she was in the bath, and I guess she couldn’t take it because they were arguing, so I don’t know, she slipped under. So he said that she had swallowed water, he, whatever, whatever. So remember this, police, of course, aren’t going to just take his word for it, so they started an investigation. During the investigation, it shows that Kelly’s blood was in every single room of the house. Every single room of the house, literally, other than beating her in every single square inch of that house. The only way I could think you could get blood in every single room of a house is to have epic nosebleeds and just walk around your house or just free flow on your monthly you know what I’m talking about? Just free flow. It which ill anyways, these are the only ways.
So unless he wants to come out and say that’s what she was doing, even if he did say that, her autopsy would say something different, which her autopsy said that there were over 150 separate injuries on her body. The autopsy also revealed that these 150 injuries were not a result of just a one time off, like, oh my God, I got so mad that I started beating her one time. This has never happened again, or this has never happened before or again. Instead, it happened over the course of time, a prolonged time. William Laueler, the home office pathologist who examined the body, he’s the one who found more than 150 injuries. And he came out and said that the injuries were inflicted over a period of at least a month. So I was saying years. He said a month, all of that in a month.
Then he also reported that in the weeks leading up to her death, she was being starved by David, which they’re still calling him David. And they also found out that she had been tied to a radiator by her hair. I guess that’s between maybe David saying that and also know maybe they’re seeing that her hair was being pulled or something. I don’t know how they oh, you know what, they probably could have figured that out based on their investigations. They found probably hair attached to the radiator, plus probably looked on her scalp. She had been burned with a hot iron. She had been stabbed dozens of times in her legs, torso, and mouth. She had been strangled.
She had also been disfigured by basically scalping her. So cutting her scalp, cutting her genitals with just different tools. So it wasn’t just one thing. It wasn’t just a knife. It could have been a knife, a box cutter. And this is allegedly I’m just saying what it could have been a screwdriver, anything like that. And they also saw that she was cut using pruning shears. Five days before her death, her eyes had been gouged out.
And during the last month of her being alive, that’s when she was bound up. So she was tied to the radiator or tied to different pieces of furniture by her hair, or she was tied by her neck, and then finally he drowned her in a tub. Pathologist Williams said, quote, in my career, I have examined almost 600 victims of homicide, but I have never come across injuries so extensive. End quote. So I listed out some of the injuries. Let’s go through the rest and it might intercept. So these are listed out. According to The Daily Mirror and The Guardian, the injuries that she sustained was scald into her buttocks and left leg.
Burns on her thigh caused by the application of a hot iron, a fractured arm, multiple stab wounds caused by knives, forks and scissors. Stab wounds inside her mouth. Crush injuries to both hands. Mutilation of her ears, nose, eyebrows, mouth, lips and genitalia wounds caused by a spade and pruning shears. Both eyes gouged out later. Stab wounds to the empty eye socket. Oh, my God. Partial scalping.
The pathologist went on to document that the eyes had been removed, quote, not less than five days and not more than three weeks before her death, she had been starved, having lost around 20 kg, which is about 44 pounds in weight, and she had not received water for several days before her death. The cause of death was drowning, immediately prior to which she had been beaten about the head with a showerhead. End quote. Then, as if that wasn’t baddy enough to find out, tommy Kelly’s father, had to go in, and he was the one who identified his daughter’s body. Her mother said, quote, People called him an animal, but an animal wouldn’t do that to another animal. He’s a very evil man. I think about how much pain she must have been in, how she must have thought we didn’t love her because we didn’t save her. End quote.
Kelly was buried the day before her 18th birthday. And the pamphlets that had been given to her mom by the Domestic Abuse Division? Yeah, well, they’re still with her because she never got a chance to see Kelly after they had given her the pamphlets. So she’d been calling them all this time. Please do a wellness check on my daughter. Please check on her. Please get her. Please. Please.
Here are some pamphlets. What good did the pamphlets do? I’m just a question. The pamphlets didn’t stop anything. On November 12, 1997, the trial started at Manchester Crown Court. James pleaded what did he plead? Lambs? Not guilty. I don’t know how he’s spinning that one, but he pled not guilty. Prosecutor Peter Openshaw told the jury about the torture that Kelly had endured. Quote, the physical pain would have been intense, causing anguish and torment to the point of mental breakdown and collapse.
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. Other people, like the once 15 year old Wendy Mattershead, came in and testified against David, who everyone now found out that his name was actually James and he was actually 49 or 46 or something like that. He was a 40 something year old man. So this is when her parents are finding this out. So during the trial, Wendy told a court that James had once held her head underwater in the kitchen sink. Quote, it frightened me, but you get to the point where you’re too frightened to do or say anything, you just took it.
hen Tina Martin, this is the 20 year old that he was with, came and testified against him too. She told the court that he used her as a human punching bag, like we said in the beginning. She also described how he punched and kicked her and beat her up while she was pregnant with their child. Quote, once I was having a bath and he got me by the throat and tried to push me under the water. What is with him in drowning these people? What is with him? Then Kelly’s mother took the stand and said, quote, on one visit, he showed me a hole in his floorboards where he said he’d had a gas leak. Just a few weeks later, he kept Kelly prisoner in the hole while he tortured her. PC Tracy Turner took the stand and told the court that James had said, quote, I’ve killed her, I know I have. And he told another police officer, quote, I know I’m going away, I know there’s no point, I’m going to get found out anyway, end quote.
I mean, I know they’re British, but I cannot I’ve already tried. You could listen to past episodes. I tried doing a British accent. So sorry, can’t do it. Then James took the stand because I don’t know why, I don’t understand why, but know, I guess he’s trying to explain why he’s not guilty. He said he was the victim. I’m sorry, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. He said he was the victim.
He said that Kelly, quote, would put me through hell, winding me up. So she made you mad and this is all her fault. He told the jury that Kelly would taunt him about his dead mother. She would tease him that, well, at least my mother’s alive and your mother’s dead. And when they asked him, well, why did you inflict all of this pain and horrors on her? He literally said he opened his mouth and said that, well, she asked me to. He said that she dared him to hurt her. I dare you. I triple dog dare you to hurt me because I don’t think you’re going to do it.
I double dog, triple dog, quadruple dog dare you. And he’s like, well, who am I to say no? What he said in a statement well, it was a statement that had been given earlier, was read in court that said that Kelly and this is what he’s saying, that Kelly, quote, had a bad habit of hurting herself to make it look worse on me. So she did all this to herself, burned herself with a curling iron, stabbed up herself, gouged her eyes out, and after they were gouged out, stabbed her eye sockets, scalped herself, starved herself, and then drowned herself in the tub. All to make it look that this was you doing it and for you to look like the bad guy. Jillian Maisie, a consultant psychiatrist, addressed the court and said that James had a, quote, severe paranoid disorder with morbid jealousy and he lived in a, quote, distorted reality. If they let this guy go due to the insane defense, I’m done. I’m packing up this podcast and I’m done. The jury of seven men and five women took 1 hour to find the 49 year old jerk guilty of first degree murder.
On November 19, 1997, he was sentenced to life in prison with the judge, Mr. Justice Sachs, recommending that James serve a minimum term of 20 years. Quote, this has been a terrible case, a catalog 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. End quote. After the trial, the jury was offered professional counseling to help them deal with what they’d seen and heard throughout the case, and every single member of the jury accepted this offer.
Kelly’s mom said she is still unable to read the autopsy report. In April 2015, which was 20 years after all of this happened, she gave her first interview to TheDailyMail Co UK. This whole time she’d been traumatized and she just couldn’t speak about her daughter’s death as I couldn’t even imagine. Currently, she’s 60 and said that one thought constantly occupies her mind. She says she wishes she killed James that first time she had that inclination to do it. Quote, I know I shouldn’t say this, but I wish I’d killed him the first time I saw him. That way Kelly would still be alive and I can’t even imagine, but I understand where she’s coming from. Quote every now and again, I phoned the coroner to ask for the postmortem report, but each time I back out.
I can’t face it. I never will. To this day, the murder of Kellyanne Bates is considered to be among the most horrible, brutal murders in British history. Kelly’s parents have set up a local branch of the national support group Support After Murder or Manslaughter, also known as Sam, with two M’s S-A-M-M for other parents who are dealing with something similar. Quote I wish I had killed Smith myself. I want him to die just like Kelly did. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about it. But he had her in her clutches and I couldn’t save her.
If you or someone you know is struggling with abuse at home, please call the National Hotlines for UK. And there’s one for United States. So the UK is the United States is 1807 nine safe, that’s 1807 97233. They also have options for texting or reaching out online. And you can find all of this in the Show Notes below. So what did you think about that case? Have you heard about that case before? That one was a really tough one for me to research and do. What do you think about the cajones on that jerk that he claims, first of all, not guilty. I couldn’t have been a juror.
First of all, he claimed not guilty. Second of all, he was like, well, it was her fault. She made me mad and then she dared me to hurt her. I can’t even imagine what the parents were going through in that courtroom. Anyways, those are my thoughts on it and I would love to hear your thoughts and you have 3 ways of sharing them with me:
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