Confessions of a Canadian Stripper

With fatal knife wounds to her body, 19-year-old model Amy Leigh Barnes said the emergency operator on the other end of the phone, “I’m dying, he stabbed me death.”  The operator than asked, “Who stabbed you?” to which the dying model said with her last gasp, “My boyfriend.”  Those two words should be enough to convict her boyfriend, 21-year-old Ricardo Morrison, and see him off to jail for the rest of his life, though having heard some of what has been said at his murder trial in the UK, he deserves the death penalty, something that is no longer in use.  Morrison went on trial yesterday.

Morrison, a soccer player with a bright future sat in the courtroom with his mother by his side, while evidence was being disclosed. His mother by the way, is a policewoman who is accused of helping her son cover up his involvement in the grisly murder, by washing his bloodstained clothes.

According to evidence heard in the courtroom, Morrison and Barnes had serious problems in their relationship, and in November of last year things came to a head when in the early morning hours Barnes sent Morrison a text informing him that their relationship was over. Morrison didn’t take too kindly to that message, and that morning he waited for Ms. Barnes’ grandmother to leave, before he took out his frustrations on the aspiring actress and former finalist in the Miss British Isles pageant.

He punched her, sprayed aerosol in her face, and hurt her arm before leaving to do some banking, locking the door behind him and leaving with the only key they had. She was trapped inside, though I think she could have managed to break a window and yell for help.

While he was away, Ms. Barnes continued texting him, pushing his buttons by calling him a “woman-beater”. She also texted her mother saying she was “Upset and tearful”, and arranged for her to come and rescue her.  By the time her father arrived on the scene, the young model was dead from her stab wounds, but this blogger believes that had she not gone out of her way to torment her killer she would be alive today.

Court heard yesterday that Ms. Barnes, after relentlessly sending texts to her boyfriend, rang up Vodafone and arranged to have his mobile phone disconnected, which was in her name by the way. The prosecutor claims that this would have frustrated Morrison enough to stab his lover 5 times in the chest, and four times in the back, upon his return home.

While I think Morrison should never see the light of day from anywhere but behind prison walls for the rest of his life, somehow I get the feeling that his victim’s family will be lucky if their daughter’s killer gets anything more than 10 years.  I suspect that if Morrison’s defense team is doing their job of defending their client properly, they will produce enough evidence to show that Barnes pushed Morrison over the edge, and that they will insist that Barnes’ was the maker of her own fate, that she shares some of the responsibility for her own death.