The Crown Hill Murder

Becky Watts was sixteen and lived with her father and stepmother on Crown Hill, in the St George area of Bristol, England. Her stepbrother, twenty-eight-year-old Nathan Matthews, lived in the Barton Hill area with his girlfriend, Shauna Hoare. On the morning of February 19, 2015, Becky’s stepmother left for an appointment, leaving her alone in the house. No one saw her again.

Matthews went to the house to take Becky in what prosecutors called a sexually motivated kidnap plan. She fought him and he suffocated her. He stabbed the body, then bought a circular saw, goggles and gloves from a hardware store the next day and used the saw to dismember her. The remains were wrapped in cling film, packed into suitcases with cat litter, and left in a garden shed at a house on Barton Court, a short walk from his own address. Police treated Becky as a missing teenager for days, until her blood turned up on the doorframe outside her bedroom, with Matthews’s fingerprints.

Matthews was arrested on February 28 and handed officers a written statement on March 2 admitting the killing and saying where the body was. It was recovered the next day. In November 2015 a Bristol jury convicted him of murder and convicted Hoare of manslaughter. Matthews received life with a thirty-three-year minimum; Hoare was given seventeen years and released in September 2023.