‘I was sleepwalking’: Can you kill someone while you’re asleep?

Published

12 months ago

June 22, 2024

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“I was sleepwalking,” a public schoolboy, wearing only his boxing shorts, was heard to say after brutally attacking two fellow students and a housemaster.

Henry Roffe-Silvester, a teacher at the exclusive boarding school, was awoken in the middle of the night by footsteps coming from the dormitory directly above.

He went to investigate, and as he opened the door to the pitch-dark room, he saw a silhouetted figure who turned and struck him on the head with a hammer.

“I stumbled backwards into the corridor,” said Mr Roffe-Silvester, during his attacker’s two-month trial. “There was a second blow – I can’t remember if it was before I stumbled back – that’s a little bit hazy for me.”

He suffered six blows to the head before managing to get the weapon off the boy he now recognised as one of his students, who “slumped down” in a squat position and was heard to say: “I was dreaming.”

When paramedics arrived at Blundell’s School in Taunton, Devon, they found “carnage” like “a scene from a horror film” with blood over the desks, the walls and the cabin-style beds.

There was no question the boy, then 16, caused the “awful injuries” to the housemaster and two sleeping dorm-mates – both boys suffered skull fractures, as well as injuries to their ribs, spleen, a punctured lung and internal bleeding.

‘Zombie apocalypse’

He told a jury at Exeter Crown Court he kept hammers by his bed for “protection” from “the zombie apocalypse” or the end of the world.

He remembered going to sleep on 8 June last year, he said, and the next thing he recalled was being in the room which was “covered in blood”.

“I knew something really bad had gone on and everyone was looking towards me,” he said.

“I didn’t remember doing anything so the only rational thing I was thinking was that I was sleepwalking.”

Prosecutors said he had armed himself with three claw hammers, then waited for his victims to fall asleep before attacking them.

But his barrister, Kerim Fuad KC, said he must have been “sleepwalking to have committed these extraordinary acts” – meaning he would be not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.

The history of the sleepwalking defence

The idea that acts of violence can be committed by people who are sleepwalking isn’t new – since the 14th century, the Catholic Church recognised the idea that a sleeper shouldn’t be held responsible for killing or injuring someone.

The first English case is believed to be the Old Bailey trial of Colonel Culpeper in 1686, who was said to have shot a guardsman and his horse during a dream. He was convicted of manslaughter while insane but pardoned a few weeks later.

More incidents came to light in the Victorian era as scientists began studying the mind, among them the famous case of Simon Fraser, a known sleepwalker, from Glasgow.

Believing he was saving his family from a wild beast that had burst through the floorboards, he killed his 18-month-old son by throwing him against a wall. He was cleared but was told by the judge to sleep alone in a locked room for the rest of his life.

More recently, in 2005 Jules Lowe was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity and made the subject of a hospital order after claiming he was sleepwalking when he beat his father to death at the family home in Walkden, Greater Manchester, after a drinking session.

Three years later, father-of-two Brian Thomas strangled his wife Christine while they were on holiday in west Wales, believing an intruder had broken into their campervan.

The nightmare was suggested to have been triggered by an earlier incident when they were disturbed by youths doing wheel spins in the car park.

Thomas was described as a “decent man and a devoted husband” by the judge after being cleared of murder when prosecutors dropped the case.

The sleepwalking defence is rare – according to sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley, who was not involved in the Blundell’s case, and tells Sky News it has been successfully used just 200 times in the English-speaking world.

Sexsomnia

But it has become increasingly common over last 30 years, says Dr John Rumbold, a lecturer at the Nottingham Law School, who tells Sky News there is a growing number of sleep experts and a greater awareness among lawyers.

In the past, reported cases more commonly involved violence, he says, but now around 80% to 90% of cases involve sexsomnia, an extreme variant of sleepwalking, that can cause people to engage in sexual activity while unconscious.

“Very often it’s drunk young men” who are accused of rape or other sex offences, he says. “They don’t really have any other defence and it’s fairly complex actions.”

Dr Stanley believes that some people who are guilty have successfully used the defence in the past and says there is a lack of knowledge of the subject among judges, lawyers and juries.

What is sleepwalking and how common is it?

Around 5% to 10% of the adult population are believed to be regular sleepwalkers, according to experts, with the condition more common in children, peaking between the ages of nine and 13, and typically occurs in the first 90 minutes of sleep.

“We all have the capacity to sleepwalk,” says Dr Neil Stanley, who says some people will do it just once in their lives, while for others it’s a more regular occurrence.

He explains sleepwalking happens when the parts of the brain that control movement and speech wake up.

This can be triggered by anything that disturbs, sleep, such as medication, alcohol, drugs, or “sleeping on your mate’s couch after a few bevvies”.

Sleepwalking is so common that hotel staff may get training in how to deal with a semi-naked guest wandering the corridors.

But the stereotypical perception of a zombie-like state with eyes closed and arms stretched “is a nonsense”, says Dr Stanley.

“They can appear for all intents and purposes, to be awake. But what they can’t do is they cannot interact with the environment as though they were awake,” he says.

It usually involves “doing something that if you did it at 1pm fully clothed wouldn’t be of any interest”, but the “fact that you’re doing it at 1am and you’re in your PJs is probably the thing that differentiates it”.

Dr Stanley adds: “Sleepwalkers do things that are instinctual behaviours. So, they will go to the fridge and get a pint of milk, they will go to the toilet, which, if they’re in a hotel or staying over somewhere, means they pee in the wardrobe or more tragically go over the balcony and kill themselves.

“We know that some sleepwalkers actually can drive while they are asleep. But none of these are interesting other than the fact that the person has no idea that they’re doing them.”

He says that in theory he could use his expertise to tell someone how to behave and what to say to convince a court they were a genuine sleepwalker.

‘Get out of jail free card’

Some see it as “a get out of jail free card”, he says, but he adds that “people, in their sleep, can kill, they can rape, they can assault – sexually or physically”.

Barrister Ramya Nagesh, who has written a book on sleepwalking and other automatism defences tells Sky News that just because it is being used more “that doesn’t mean that it’s being used in bad faith because you do have to have expert opinion”.

She thinks there should be a change in the law to allow a verdict of not guilty by virtue of a medical condition to encompass cases involving sleepwalking, epileptic fits and hypoglycaemia.

“Automatism is an outright acquittal – it feels a bit odd to say we’ll excuse them, but they might go off and do it again,” she says.

“They don’t deserve to go to prison and wouldn’t benefit from a hospital order, so it would give judges a bit more power.”

The public schoolboy, now 17, who can’t be identified because of his age, has been found guilty of three counts of attempted murder after a jury deliberated for 40 hours and he will be sentenced in October.

His relatives told the jury there was a history of sleepwalking in the family and he said his mother had found him at the bottom of a staircase in their home around a decade ago.

A ‘textbook example’?

After the attacks, the teenager told a student he was watching horror movies, while others heard him say: “I am sorry, I was dreaming.”

At his trial, sleep forensic expert, Dr Mark Pressman, who has decades of experience in the field, has seen 20,000 patients and more than 100 cases of sleepwalking violence, was called as a witness.

He described the case in court as a “textbook example”, explaining sleepwalkers could be fearful for their lives and “respond with violence to protect themselves at a very primitive level”.

“The defendant swivelled around and attacked his housemaster without knowing who he was,” he said. He was not aware he had attacked the housemaster.”

But another expert witness, Dr John O’Reilly, told the court he did not believe the boy was asleep as a sleepwalker does not initiate violence because it is triggered by noise or touch.

Prosecutors said he had been awake shortly before the attacks, with an examination of his iPad showing he had been listening to music on Spotify, and that he had a fascination with serial killers.

‘Lucky to still be alive’

In his room, he kept a locked stash of what other pupils described as “weapons”, including shards of broken glass, screwdrivers and multiple hammers.

Police discovered he had carried out internet searches for “rampage killers”, “school massacres”, “murder with a hammer” and “killer kills while sleeping”.

He had sent alarming messages to one of his victims in the months before the attack – including a character from the horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre wielding a hammer.

“These violent actions were repeated again and again,” said prosecutor James Dawes KC, and there was “no other explanation for his actions other than his intention to kill them”.

Following his conviction, senior crown prosecutor Helen Phillips said the two boys were “lucky to still be alive”.

“The boy, who had a macabre interest in murder, serial killers, and violence, showed no remorse and naïvely thought that by concocting a story about sleepwalking at the time of the attack he could evade punishment,” she added.

UK

US-UK trade deal ‘done’, says Trump as he meets Starmer at G7

Published

4 hours ago

June 17, 2025

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US-UK trade deal 'done', says Trump as he meets Starmer at G7

The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.

The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”

Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.

“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.

Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.

However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.

What exactly does trade deal being ‘done’ mean?

The government says the US “has committed” to removing tariffs (taxes on imported goods) on UK aerospace goods, such as engines and aircraft parts, which currently stand at 10%.

That is “expected to come into force by the end of the month”.

Tariffs on car imports will drop from 27.5% to 10%, the government says, which “saves car manufacturers hundreds of millions a year, and protects tens of thousands of jobs”.

The White House says there will be a quote of 100,000 cars eligible for import at that level each year.

But on steel, the story is a little more complicated.

The UK is the only country exempted from the global 50% tariff rate on steel – which means the UK rate remains at the original level of 25%.

That tariff was expected to be lifted entirely, but the government now says it will “continue to go further and make progress towards 0% tariffs on core steel products as agreed”.

The White House says the US will “promptly construct a quota at most-favoured-nation rates for steel and aluminium articles”.

Other key parts of the deal include import and export quotas for beef – and the government is keen to emphasise that “any US imports will need to meet UK food safety standards”.

There is no change to tariffs on pharmaceuticals for the moment, and the government says “work will continue to protect industry from any further tariffs imposed”.

The White House says they “committed to negotiate significantly preferential treatment outcomes”.

Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”

He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.

“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”

Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.

As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.

Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”

The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.

Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.

In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.

Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.

UK

Whitehall officials tried to cover up grooming scandal in 2011, Dominic Cummings says

Published

10 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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Whitehall officials tried to cover up grooming scandal in 2011, Dominic Cummings says

Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.

Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.

In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.

Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled

The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.

In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.

The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.

Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.

Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.

“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’

“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…

“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”

The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.

A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.

One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.

There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.

Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.

Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal

Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.

He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”

He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.

Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.

“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.

The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.

UK

Flawed data used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’, Baroness Casey finds

Published

13 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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Flawed data used repeatedly to dismiss claims about 'Asian grooming gangs', Baroness Casey finds

Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.

The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.

Politics latest: Yvette Cooper reveals details of grooming gangs report

The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.

In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.

Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”

The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.

She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.

The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.

On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.

‘Flawed data’

However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.

She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.

“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.

“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”

The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.

She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.

‘Deep-rooted failure’

Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.

“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.

She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”

Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.

“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”

Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.

“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.

“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”

The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.

It is also launching new police operations and a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.

There will also be new ethnicity data and research “so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse,” the home secretary said.