Mother's joke that festered in a killer's warped mind

As Susan Carr and Peter Killeen got into a taxi for a night out, she joked with the driver - her boss at the Stanley taxi firm where she worked - that the stomach pain she was suffering was probably due to wind.

To most people it would have been considered an innocent joke -not very funny, but a joke nevertheless.

To tattooed killer Peter Killeen it was a flirtatious comment and grounds for murder.

The obsessively jealous 57-year-old stormed out of the cab and the pair did not see each other for two days - two days in which Susan Carr got on with the last days of her life, looking after her teenage children Lee, 19, and Kirsty, then aged 14, celebrating her 38th birthday, playing darts with her friends, working at the taxi firm - two days in which the minor incident festered in Killeen's warped mind.

He had a long history of violence. Born in 1947, Killeen was first sent to a detention centre at the age of 16 for, alarmingly given what was to come, stabbing a teenage girlfriend who had dumped him. Three years later, he assaulted an elderly man who was trying to chastise him for smashing shop windows.

He was sent to prison in 1967 after hitting a man with a bottle and in May 1968 he was convicted of grievous bodily harm for a violent assault on an Annfield Plain bus driver.

For those offences, which his own barrister Ben Nolan described as "a background of extreme delinquency" he spent six years in mental institutions, including five years in Rampton Hospital.

However, following his release in 1974, he went on to lead an uneventful life. During the next three decades, he had three wives, six children and no job before tragedy struck in December 2002.

Joan, the wife he had nursed through prolonged ill health, died. Within three months he was in a relationship with Joan's best friend, Susan Carr.

Mrs Carr was a single mother who, according to her own mum, 60-year-old Thelma Cruddas, who lived about a mile from her daughter in South Stanley, only had three or four boyfriends during her life.

The court heard her described as "a popular, helpful and happy individual", who was a regular member of the women's darts team at the British Legion Club, in Craghead, and worked on the telephones at a nearby taxi office.

Mrs Cruddas said: "Susan never did anyone a bad turn in her life. She was well liked, she was a good mother who brought her children up by herself and she was very proud of them both. She was a wonderful daughter."

The relationship soured very quickly, fuelled by Killeen's jealousy.

Paul Sloan, prosecuting, told the court yesterday: "He was very possessive of Susan Carr and very domineering in his attitude towards her.

"He didn't like her having anything to do with other men. His irrational fits of jealousy led to loss of temper, particularly when he was in drink.

"He was very unpredictable and likely to fly off the handle at any time."

Over the months, the bruises started to show and Killeen was involved in attacks on men he wrongly believed were flirting with Mrs Carr.

Late in 2003, she broke the relationship off provoking a fresh wave of violence - Killeen smashed up the doors of her house leaving her screaming and covered in shards of glass, on New Year's Eve. Her car was smashed up.

She took the precaution of changing her locks, her phone number and installing security cameras in her home. She applied to Derwentside District Council to be re-housed, telling housing officers: "I still don't feel safe, I can't sleep because of what he might do."

Eventually, they were reunited - although she kept the renewed relationship a secret from her family. But the violence escalated once more, until the fateful night Mrs Carr made an unguarded comment to the taxi driver.

Two days later, she was dead. Detective Superintendent Dave Jones said: "We feel the motive for the killing quite definitely relates back to the taxi incident. There was a pattern in his behaviour, he was very jealous and suspected she was flirting, but there was never any evidence of that."

Prosecutors are convinced she was dead within moments of going into Killeen's bungalow, in Palm Terrace.

After what Paul Sloan QC described as "a prolonged and horrendously brutal attack", Killeen went to the kitchen and cleaned the knife, before dropping it in the bedroom next to Mrs Carr's lifeless, blood-stained body.

He then gave inflicted superficial cuts on himself in an effort to pretend that she had attacked him.

He took a small handful of pills and wrote a fake suicide note in which he said he was sorry for the way things had turned out and implied that Mrs Carr had attacked him, then inserted entries into a diary detailing incidents of domestic violence, which he claimed to have suffered at the hands of his victim.

When he finally rang paramedics at 4.32am he told them she had initiated the attack. Police and ambulance crews found him sitting calmly and coherently in a chair in the living room. He later claimed to have no recollection of events.

In one of the first cases of its kind, the Crown Prosecution Service and police began working together on the case within hours of the crime, calling in forensic scientists and asking for medical evidence to piece together a case for conviction.

It quickly became clear that Killeen was lying.

DNA tests proved only his blood was on the knife, proving he was the last to be stabbed, while blood distribution patterns showed the attack had not started in the kitchen as he claimed.

"He was very calculated," said Det Supt Jones. "I believe he was setting the scene to claim it was manslaughter."

As she left court in her wheelchair yesterday, Mrs Carr's mother Thelma Cruddas remembered the day she had to identify her daughter.

"She was unrecognisable," she said. "I couldn't even say it was her. It wasn't until I noticed her toe which was deformed that I realised it was definitely Susan.

"We will never get over what that man did to her."