The Gorton Confession

James Patterson Smith was forty-eight and living in Gorton, a district of east Manchester, England. He met Kelly Anne Bates when she was still a young teenager, and at sixteen she moved into his house on Furnival Road. Her family grew worried as she saw less and less of them, and her mother last saw her in November 1995. Smith already had a long record of hurting the women he dated.

On April 16, 1996, Smith walked into Gorton police station and said his girlfriend had drowned in the bath. Officers who went to the house found a very different story. Seventeen-year-old Kelly had been kept in the house and tortured for at least three weeks before her death. The pathologist recorded more than 150 separate injuries, and she had been drowned after being struck on the head. Former partners came forward to describe the violence Smith had used against them.

Smith claimed Kelly’s death was an accident, but the evidence left no room for that account. At Manchester Crown Court in November 1997, the jury needed less than an hour to find him guilty of murder. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with a recommended minimum of twenty years, calling him a highly dangerous abuser of women.