A KILLER who stabbed a childhood friend 21 times before attending a street party to celebrate the Royal wedding of William and Kate is to spend at least 13 years in prison .
Alcoholic Robert Scott, 35, later told authorities he held back from confessing to the drunken murder of his next door neighbour Richard Hicking because: “There’s always this part of you thinks you can get away it.”
Yesterday, Mr Justice McCloskey told Scott, who murdered his 31-year-old friend in his Clarawood Park flat in east Belfast that, had he admitted his guilt earlier, his sentence would have been less.
Mr Hicking was found dead in April 2011 lying in a pool of dried blood in his flat just across the hallway from that of his lifelong friend, Scott. He had stabbed him 14 times in the chest, six times in the side and once in the middle of his back.
His wheelchair-bound mother Jacqueline Hicking said while the sentence “was a bit short”, she felt “justice has been done” and although “time will heal”, she will “never forgive him” for murdering her son.
The Belfast Crown Court judge said Scott had persisted in “the myth of innocence” and his first opportunity for pleading guilty “had long passed”.
However, Mr Justice McCloskey said his belated plea “still qualifies for some credit”, but added: “The conclusion that he would have qualified for a substantially greater measure of credit had he pleaded guilty sooner, is irresistible.”
Mr Justice McCloskey said despite Scott’s initial denials to police, forensic evidence proved damning with traces of blood uncovered in his flat and on his dark blue Northern Ireland tracksuit that he had been wearing that fateful evening and a purple rug of Scott’s that had been secreted in his wardrobe.
Forensic tests also revealed this blood and that in the adjoining hallway had come from Mr Hicking, while fibres found on his clothes matched those found on Scott’s tracksuit. Scott conceded he had tried to mount a “clean-up” of his flat using a mop found partly-burnt behind the flats and which police traced to having been one of two mops bought by Scott’s mother some months before.
Mr Justice McCloskey said it was the prosecution case that “for whatever reason”, Scott had “mounted a savage attack with a knife on the deceased, stabbing him many times, and killing him by a stab wound which penetrated his heart”.
However, following his guilty plea, Scott, while talking to a probation officer preparing his pre-sentence report, claimed it was his friend who had been the aggressor, and had “confronted him brandishing a knife and lunged at him”.
In the report Scott said he managed to get the knife from Mr Hicking, whom he stabbed, and then, “a short while later ... realised he had killed Mr Hickings”.
Mr Justice McCloskey said in his view the murder was aggravated by the multiple injuries inflicted and by Scott’s “attempts to extinguish and destroy evidence” and although his efforts were “inept and unlikely to succeed”, they were nonetheless “conscious and elaborate efforts to defeat the ends of justice”.
In turn, by way of mitigation, was Scott’s remorse, which although “unquestionably belated, its sincerity has not been questioned”.