Postman who murdered and beheaded girlfriend jailed for at least 23 years
Warning: This article contains details readers may find distressing.
An “evil” postman who moaned about being lonely hours before he severed his girlfriend’s head and tried to dismember her body has been jailed for a minimum of 23 years.
Ewan Methven murdered 21-year-old Phoenix Spencer-Horn in the flat they shared in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, in November last year.
The High Court in Glasgow heard the killer dumped his partner’s body parts in their hallway and failed to call emergency services for two days.
Phoenix Spencer-Horn was murdered in November
The 27-year-old then bought drugs, watched pornography and sent sickening texts to Phoenix’s worried mum pretending she was still alive.
Phoenix was stabbed 20 times – including 10 times in the face – using three knives in an attack that unfolded after she returned from her waitressing job in Lanarkshire.
The 21-year-old had described Methven as her “soulmate” on social media, saying in one TikTok video: “Life is so much more beautiful and full of colour with you.”
A few months later she was murdered by the same man she had been in a relationship with for two years.
Ewan Methven was jailed on Monday. Pic: Police Scotland
Methven received a life sentence with at least 23 years behind bars when he retuned to the dock on Monday.
The judge, Lord Matthews, described it as a “dreadful crime”.
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Judge sentences murderer Ewan Methven
He told Methven: “You were a trusted member of her family, but you betrayed that trust and robbed her of life in the cruellest way.
“Not content with what you had done to her, you robbed her of all dignity in death by decapitating her and trying to dismember her in an attempt to defeat the ends of justice.”
The pair had been in a relationship for two years
Lord Matthews highlighted victim impact statements supplied by Phoenix’s family and said he had “rarely read such outpourings of grief”.
The judge said: “The way you treated this innocent young woman after her death meant that her family did not even have the comfort of saying goodbye to her.”
He added: “I have this morning seen a letter written by you, but it answers none of the questions which must be plaguing the family. You blame the effect of substances but that is no excuse.”
‘Personification of evil’
Sky News has interviewed the couple’s neighbour who lives directly next door.
Toni Brown, 25, described the horror of discovering what happened.
She said: “I think I stayed out of the house for about a week after that. I couldn’t even sit.
“It’s horrific. It gives me shivers thinking about it. It is crazy to think I stayed next door to a monster like that.
“What scares me the most is knowing she was lay there and I was in here oblivious.”
Neighbour Toni Brown spoke to Sky News
Asked whether she heard any noises or violence around the time of the murder, Ms Brown said: “There was a bad smell in my house in the early hours of the morning she was found.
“There was a bad smell in my kitchen basically where the walls join together.”
Methven’s own defence lawyer told the court that society will see the killer as the “personification of evil”.
When he eventually called 999, he claimed to have suffered a drug-induced blackout during the violent killing.
Ms Spencer-Horn was murdered by the man she once called her ‘soulmate’
Another life lost to gender-based violence
The case has raised questions once again about the growing prevalence of gender-based violence.
Fiona Drouet’s daughter Emily was 18 when she took her own life at university in Aberdeen in 2016, days after being choked and slapped by her ex-boyfriend.
Angus Milligan was later convicted of physical and psychological abuse.
Fiona Drouet’s daughter was a victim of physical abuse from an ex-boyfriend
Ms Drouet, who now campaigns on violence against women across the UK and Ireland, has set up a charity called Emily’s Test in her daughter’s name.
Reacting to the death of Ms Spencer-Horn, Ms Drouet told Sky News: “There is another mother and father that have just been plunged into utter hell.
“Somebody once said to me that if God came to you and said, ‘I am going to give you this beautiful daughter, but you’ll only have her for 18 years and then we need to take her back, would you still want her?’ and I would take those 18 years and go through the pain rather than have nothing.
“Although just now that probably offers no words of comfort for Phoenix’s parents, maybe one day it can.”
If you suspect you are being abused and need to speak to someone, there are people who can help you, including The National Domestic Violence Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or Women’s Aid online.
A nine-year-old girl found dead in Weston-super-Mare has been named on the day police revealed a teenager had been charged with her murder.
Emergency services were called to Lime Close in the Somerset town at 6.09pm on Monday but Aria Thorpe was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said a 15-year-old boy had been charged with her murder and that a preliminary post-mortem found she died from a single stab wound.
The teenage boy – who can’t be named due to his age – will appear at Bristol Magistrates’ Court later today.
A police cordon remains in place as forensics officers continue their work.
Flowers and tributes have been left at the scene. Pic: PA
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Superintendent Jen Appleford, from Avon and Somerset Police, said the community was in shock and Aria’s family were being supported by police.
“It is impossible to adequately describe how traumatic the past 36 hours have been for them and we’d like to reiterate in the strongest possible terms their request for privacy,” she said.
Supt Appleford said police were working with local schools and other agencies to make sure support is available.
Britain loves chocolate.
We’re estimated to consume 8.2kg each every year, a good chunk of it at Christmas, but the cost of that everyday luxury habit has been rising fast.
Whitakers have been making chocolate in Skipton in North Yorkshire for 135 years, but they have never experienced price pressures as extreme as those in the last five.
“We buy liquid chocolate and since 2023, the price of our chocolate has doubled,” explains William Whitaker, the real-life Willy Wonka and the fourth generation of the family to run the business.
William Whitaker, managing director of the company
“It could have been worse. If we hadn’t been contracted [with a supplier], it would have trebled.
“That represents a £5,000 per-tonne increase, and we use a thousand tonnes a year. And we only sell £12-£13m of product, so it’s a massive effect.”
Whitakers makes 10 million pieces of chocolate a week in a factory on the much-expanded site of the original bakery where the business began.
Automated production lines snake through the site moulding, cutting, cooling, coating and wrapping a relentless procession of fondants, cremes, crisps and pure chocolate products for customers, including own-brand retail, supermarkets, and the catering trade.
Steepest inflation in the business
All of them have faced price increases as Whitakers has grappled with some of the steepest inflation in the food business.
Cocoa prices have soared in the last two years, largely because of a succession of poor cocoa harvests in West Africa, where Ghana and the Ivory Coast produce around two-thirds of global supply.
A combination of drought and crop disease cut global output by around 14% last year, pushing consumer prices in the other direction, with chocolate inflation passing 17% in the UK in October.
Skimpflation and shrinkflation
Some major brands have responded by cutting the chocolate content of products – “skimpflation” – or charging more for less – “shrinkflation”.
Household-name brands including Penguin and Club have cut the cocoa and milk solid content so far they can no longer be classified as chocolate, and are marketed instead as “chocolate-flavour”.
Whitakers have stuck to their recipes and product sizes, choosing to pass price increases on to customers while adapting products to the new market conditions.
“Not only are major brands putting up prices over 20%, sometimes 40%, they’ve also reduced the size of their pieces and sometimes the ingredients,” says William Whitaker.
“We haven’t done any of that. We knew that long-term, the market will fall again, and that happier days will return.
“We’ve introduced new products where we’ve used chocolate as a coating rather than a solid chocolate because the centre, which is sugar-based, is cheaper than the chocolate.
“We’ve got a big product range of fondant creams, and others like gingers and Brazil nuts, where we’re using that chocolate as a coating.”
The costs are adding up
A deluge of price rises
Brazil nuts have enjoyed their own spike in price, more than doubling to £15,000 a tonne at one stage.
On top of commodity prices determined by markets beyond their control, Whitakers face the same inflationary pressures as other UK businesses.
“We’ve had the minimum wage increasing every year, we had the national insurance rise last year, and sort of hidden a little bit in this budget is a business rate increase.
“This is a small business, we turn over £12m, but our rates will go up nearly £100,000 next year before any other costs.
“If you add up all the cocoa and all the other cost increases in 2024 and 2025, it’s nearly £3m of cost increases we’ve had to bear. Some of that is returning to a little normality. It does test the relevance of what you do.”
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