Kyle Clifford: Violent misogyny of kind promoted by Andrew Tate ‘fuelled rape and triple murder’, prosecution says
The violent misogyny promoted by the likes of Andrew Tate fuelled a former soldier’s rape of his ex-girlfriend and the murder of her along with her mother and sister, the prosecution argued in court.
Warning: This article contains distressing details.
Kyle Clifford, 26, had been searching YouTube for the 38-year-old controversial influencer’s podcast the day before he carried out the four-hour attack, it was said in legal argument ahead of his trial.
It can only now be reported because Judge Mr Justice Bennathan excluded the evidence from the trial, saying that it was of “limited relevance” and too prejudicial.
But he added that anyone who takes a close interest in Tate, a “poster boy for misogynists”, could also be seen as a misogynist.
Clifford tricked his way inside the family home in Bushey, Hertfordshire, on 9 July last year on the pretext of returning a bag of 25-year-old Louise Hunt’s clothes 13 days after she dumped him.
He made sure her father, the BBC and Sky Sports racing commentator John Hunt, wasn’t home before stabbing her mother Carol Hunt, 61, to death with a 10-inch butchering knife.
Clifford laid in wait for more than an hour until Louise returned from work at the dog grooming business she ran from a pod in the garden, tied her arms and ankles with duct tape, gagged her and raped her.
Carol Hunt and her daughters Hannah and Louise.
Pic: Facebook
He held her captive for hours before shooting her through the chest with a crossbow, using the same weapon to kill her sister Hannah Hunt, a 28-year-old beauty therapist, when she returned home minutes later.
Clifford pleaded guilty to three counts of murder, false imprisonment, and two counts of possession of offensive weapons but denied raping Louise – claiming the DNA found on her body was from 16 days earlier.
He has now been found guilty of the charge by a jury at Cambridge Crown Court.
Interest in Andrew Tate
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
CCTV shows Clifford’s movements
Clifford had been searching YouTube for Tate’s podcast the day before the murders and is believed to have watched up to 10 of the influencer’s videos.
One of Louise Hunt’s friends had previously asked why he was watching one of Tate’s videos involving drugged animals and he said: “Because it’s funny,” it was said during legal argument before the trial.
Prosecutors argued the “violent misogyny promoted by Tate” was the same kind that “fuelled both the murders” and the rape” committed by Clifford.
Alison Morgan KC said his interest in the “widely known misogynist” helped to explain why he became so “incandescent with rage” after she ended the relationship.
Andrew Tate. File pic: AP
In throwing out the evidence, the judge said that there was likely to be ongoing reporting about Tate after he and his brother Tristan, 36, flew to the US from Romania on Thursday after travel restrictions imposed on the pair were lifted.
A criminal investigation has since been launched into the British-American pair – who are already subject to an ongoing probe into alleged people trafficking in Romania – in Florida.
They are also due to be extradited to the UK after that case to face separate accusations of rape and trafficking dating back to between 2012 and 2015.
The brothers deny any wrongdoing.
‘Misogynistic and sexualised’ comments
Clifford had recently been sacked from his job at a catering supply firm in Waltham Cross.
It also emerged in legal argument that he was said to have made “misogynistic and sexualised comments” about female colleagues in the workplace.
He hid two relationships with women he knew through work from Louise during their 18-month relationship, which started after they met on a dating website.
It can now be reported Clifford went on dating apps Hinge and Tinder moments after Louise ended their 18-month relationship in a message on 26 June last year.
Clifford then started planning his attack, buying a length of rope just two days later, and on 30 June he researched crossbows before searching for a pornographic video of a Wandsworth prison officer having sex with an inmate.
Brother serving life sentence for murder
He also discussed crossbows with his brother Bradley Clifford, who he would visit in prison every other week, where he is serving a life sentence for murdering a teenager in 2017.
Bradley Clifford drunkenly mowed down 19-year-old Jahshua Francis, who was riding a moped, and his pillion passenger Sobhan Khan, 18, after his “prized” red Mustang was damaged.
Bradley Clifford. Pic: Met Police
Police said Kyle Clifford had plenty of opportunities to back out of the 9 July attack but was “absolutely cold-blooded and calculated in his actions”.
In legal argument not before the jury, Ms Morgan said “highly sexualised violence played a part in what took place” and that Clifford was trying to “misogynistically control Louise Hunt for one more time”.
‘Sense of entitlement’
She described him as a man whose identity was based on “whether he has the right number of women and the admiration of women” and “doesn’t like to be told, ‘No,’ by women”.
Ms Morgan said his “sense of entitlement” and the “spite and the sleight” of being dumped fuelled the sexualised violence.
After the murders, CCTV footage shows Clifford calmly leaving the Hunt family home in the quiet cul-de-sac of Ashlyn Close carrying a backpack and holding the crossbow hidden under a blanket.
He drove to a cemetery near his home in Enfield, north London, where he shot himself in the chest with the weapon as armed police descended the next day following a manhunt.
A makeshift noose was found in a nearby tree, but police and prosecutors don’t believe he made a genuine attempt to end his life, although he was left paralysed from the chest down.
The trial was held in Cambridge to accommodate him as a wheelchair user, but he refused to attend.
Kyle Clifford in 2023
‘Underwhelming individual’
His victims’ friends and family, including John Hunt – who has one surviving daughter Amy – sat in the public gallery to hear the harrowing details of the case.
Detective Chief Inspector Nick Gardner described Clifford, who served in the army from 2019 for around three years, as an “entirely underwhelming individual” with a failed military career who couldn’t hold down a job.
He worked as a private security guard for a few months in 2023, then was sacked from his job at Reynolds shortly before the murders.
Louise had told a friend Clifford had a “nasty temper”, while friends and family members described him as “odd” or “disrespectful, rude and arrogant”.
Clifford came to the attention of police in London in relation to alleged offences of possession of cannabis, assault without injury and theft when he was a juvenile between 2012 and 2013, but they didn’t result in charges or convictions.
Police say there were no obvious red flags that he would go on to commit such a crime.
Nigel Farage has told Sky News he would allow some essential migration in areas with skill shortages but that numbers would be capped.
The Reform UK leader said he would announce the cap “in four years’ time” after he was pressed repeatedly by Sky’s deputy political editor Sam Coates about his manifesto pledge to freeze “non-essential” immigration.
Politics latest: PM accused of ‘shameful’ language in migration crackdown
It was put to Mr Farage that despite his criticism of the government’s migration crackdown, allowing essential migration in his own plans is quite a big caveat given the UK’s skills shortages.
However the Clacton MP said he would allow people to plug the gaps on “time dependent work permits” rather than on longer-term visas.
He said: “Let’s take engineering, for argument’s sake. We don’t train enough engineers, we just don’t. It’s crazy.
“We’ve been pushing young people to doing social sciences degrees or whatever it is.
“So you’re an engineering company, you need somebody to come in on skills. If they come in, on a time dependent work permit, if all the right health assurances and levies have been paid and if at the end of that period of time, you leave or you’re forced to leave, then it works.”
Read more:
What are Starmer’s new immigration rules?
The choice facing Labour in face of Reform threat – analysis
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
‘We need to reduce immigration’
Reform’s manifesto, which they call a “contract”, says that “essential skills, mainly around healthcare, must be the only exception” to migration.
Pressed on how wide his exemption would be, Mr Farage said he hopes enough nurses and doctors will be trained “not to need anybody from overseas within the space of a few years”.
He said that work permits should be separate to immigration, adding: “If you get a job for an American TV station and you stay 48 hours longer than your work permit, they will smash your front door down, put you in handcuffs and deport you.
“We allow all of these routes, whether it’s coming into work, whether it’s coming as a student, we have allowed all of these to become routes for long-term migration.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Sky’s Sam Coates questions PM on migration
Asked if he would put a cap on his essential skills exemption, he said: “We will. I can’t tell you the numbers right now, I don’t have all the figures. What I can tell you is anyone that comes in will not be allowed to stay long-term. That’s the difference.”
Pressed if that was a commitment to a cap under a Reform UK government, he suggested he would set out further detail ahead of the next election, telling Coates: “Ask me in four years’ time, all right?”
Mr Farage was speaking after the government published an immigration white paper which pledged to ban overseas care workers as part of a package of measures to bring down net migration.
The former Brexit Party leader claimed the proposals were a “knee jerk reaction” to his party’s success at the local elections and accused the prime minister of not having the vigour to “follow them through”.
However he said he supports the “principle” of banning foreign care workers and conceded he might back some of the measures if they are put to a vote in parliament.
He said: “If it was stuff that did actually bind the government, there might be amendments on this that you would support. But I’m not convinced.”
The combination of full prisons and tight public finances has forced the government to urgently rethink its approach.
Top of the agenda for an overhaul are short sentences, which look set to give way to more community rehabilitation.
The cost argument is clear – prison is expensive. It’s around £60,000 per person per year compared to community sentences at roughly £4,500 a year.
But it’s not just saving money that is driving the change.
Research shows short custodial terms, especially for first-time offenders, can do more harm than good, compounding criminal behaviour rather than acting as a deterrent.
Charlie describes herself as a former ‘junkie shoplifter’
This is certainly the case for Charlie, who describes herself as a former “junkie, shoplifter from Leeds” and spoke to Sky News at Preston probation centre.
She was first sent down as a teenager and has been in and out of prison ever since. She says her experience behind bars exacerbated her drug use.
Charlie in February 2023
“In prison, I would never get clean. It’s easy, to be honest, I used to take them in myself,” she says. “I was just in a cycle of getting released, homeless, and going straight back into trap houses, drug houses, and that cycle needs to be broken.”
Eventually, she turned her life around after a court offered her drug treatment at a rehab facility.
She says that after decades of addiction and criminality, one judge’s decision was the turning point.
👉 Click here to listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈
“That was the moment that changed my life and I just want more judges to give more people that chance.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
How to watch Sophy Ridge’s special programme live from Preston Prison
Also at Preston probation centre, but on the other side of the process, is probation officer Bex, who is also sceptical about short sentences.
“They disrupt people’s lives,” she says. “So, people might lose housing because they’ve gone to prison… they come out homeless and may return to drug use and reoffending.”
Read more from Sky News:
Care homes face ban on overseas recruitment
Woman reveals impact of little-known disorder
Bex works with offenders to turn their lives around
Bex has seen first-hand the value of alternative routes out of crime.
“A lot of the people we work with have had really disjointed lives. It takes a long time for them to trust someone, and there’s some really brilliant work that goes on every single day here that changes lives.”
It’s people like Bex and Charlie, and places like Preston probation centre, that are at the heart of the government’s change in direction.
:: Watch special programme on prisons on Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge at 7pm
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s only three ways to spend the taxpayers’ hard-earned when it comes to prisons. More walls, more bars and more guards.”
Prison reform is one of the hardest sells in government.
Hospitals, schools, defence – these are all things you would put on an election leaflet.
Even the less glamorous end of the spectrum – potholes and bin collections – are vote winners.
But prisons? Let’s face it, the governor’s quote from the Shawshank Redemption reflects public polling pretty accurately.
Right now, however, reform is unavoidable because the system is at breaking point.
It’s a phrase that is frequently used so carelessly that it’s been diluted into cliche. But in this instance, it is absolutely correct.
Without some kind of intervention, the prison system is at breaking point.
It will break.
Inside Preston Prison
Ahead of the government’s Sentencing Review, expected to recommend more non-custodial sentences, I’ve been talking to staff and inmates at Preston Prison, a Category B men’s prison originally built in 1790.
Overcrowding is at 156% here, according to the Howard League.
Sophy Ridge talking outside Preston Prison
One prisoner I interviewed, in for burglary, was, until a few hours before, sharing his cell with his son.
It was his son’s first time in jail – but not his. He had been out of prison since he was a teenager. More than 30 years – in and out of prison.
His family didn’t like it, he said, and now he has, in his own words, dragged his son into it.
Sophie is a prison officer and one of those people who would be utterly brilliant doing absolutely anything, and is exactly the kind of person we should all want working in prisons.
She said the worst thing about the job is seeing young men, at 18, 19, in jail for the first time. Shellshocked. Mental health all over the place. Scared.
And then seeing them again a couple of years later.
And then again.
The same faces. The officers get to know them after a while, which in a way is nice but also terrible.
Sophy Ridge talking to one of the officers who works within Preston Prison
The £18bn spectre of reoffending
We know the stats about reoffending, but it floored me how the system is failing. It’s the same people. Again and again.
The Sentencing Review, which we’re just days away from, will almost certainly recommend fewer people go to prison, introducing more non-custodial or community sentencing and scrapping short sentences that don’t rehabilitate but instead just start people off on the reoffending merry-go-round, like some kind of sick ride.
But they’ll do it on the grounds of cost (reoffending costs £18bn a year, a prison place costs £60,000 a year, community sentences around £4,500 per person).
They’ll do it because prisons are full (one of Keir Starmer’s first acts was being forced to let prisoners out early because there was no space).
If the government wants to be brave, however, it should do it on the grounds of reform, because prison is not working and because there must be a better way.
Inside Preston Prison, Sky News saw first-hand a system truly at breaking point
A cold, hard look
I’ve visited prisons before, as part of my job, but this was different.
Before it felt like a PR exercise, I was taken to one room in a pristine modern prison where prisoners were learning rehabilitation skills.
This time, I felt like I really got under the skin of Preston Prison.
It’s important to say that this is a good prison, run by a thoughtful governor with staff that truly care.
But it’s still bloody hard.
“You have to be able to switch off,” one officer told me, “Because the things you see….”
Staff are stretched and many are inexperienced because of high turnover.
After a while, I understood something that had been nagging me. Why have I been given this access? Why are people being so open with me? This isn’t what usually happens with prisons and journalists.
Read more from Sky News:
Hospital accused of ‘covering up’ suspended surgeon concerns
Thunderstorms forecast for large part of UK
BAFTA TV Awards: Nine stand-out moments
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Probation centres answer to UK crime?
That’s when I understood.
They want people to know. They want people to know that yes, they do an incredible job and prisons aren’t perfect, but they’re not as bad as you think.
But that’s despite the government, not because of it.
Sometimes the worst thing you can do on limited resources is to work so hard you push yourself to the brink, so the system itself doesn’t break, because then people think ‘well maybe we can continue like this after all… maybe it’s okay’.
But things aren’t okay. When people say the system is at breaking point – this time it isn’t a cliche.
They really mean it.
:: Watch special programme on prisons on Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge at 7pm
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway