BRUTON: JEALOUS LOVER WHO SMASHED CAR IN TO EX’S HOUSE IS FACING JAIL

A debt-ridden hairdresser who planned to ‘go out in a blaze of glory’ when he smashed his car at 80mph into his ex-girlfriend’s sitting room is facing jail today (fri).
 
Tara Lavery, 41, felt her whole house shake and rushed downstairs in her dressing gown to find 42-year-old Edmund Bruton sitting in his black Peugeot 206 in her lounge surrounded by rubble.
 
The jealous businessman had drunk a litre of anti-freeze and created a suicide device with a garden fork and screwdriver, before trying to kill Ms Lavery and whoever else happened to be there in the crash.
 
Bruton hoped to ‘take out as many people possible’ in the failed death mission which demolished the front wall of her property in South View Avenue, Caversham, near Reading, Berkshire, on the early afternoon of February 26, this year.
 
Three children under 14, who were in the lounge making a den at the time were fortunate to escape with only minor injuries.
 
A fourth child was on his way upstairs at the moment of impact trying to hand Ms Lavery her mobile to answer a call.
 
Bruton could not cope with the end of the relationship and the failure of his business.
 
He claimed he had only intended to kill himself during the trial at Inner London Crown Court.

But following around three and a half hours’ of deliberations the jury found Bruton guilty of criminal damage with intent to endanger life and dangerous driving.

They cleared him of attempted murder.

Judge Lindsay Burn said it was an ‘unusual and worrying case’ and warned Bruton he was facing a ‘substantial custodial sentence’.
 
Shop worker Ms Lavery, who had been upstairs reading a book that Saturday morning, wept as she recalled the terror of her home looking like a bombsite and discovering the bloodied, dust-covered children.
 
She said:’They had made a camp in the front room. The girls had taken down duvets and throws. They were taking turns on the Wii.
 
‘I was about to choose my clothes from the wardrobe.
 
‘All I could hear was this horrendous noise.
 
‘A car was definitely revving.
 
‘There was a sick feeling it was something related to him.
 
‘It was just the most amazing noise as the car hit the house and the revving engine, smoke and dust.
 
‘The whole house shook.
 
‘I was in my bedroom.
 
‘I didn’t know if the children were alive in that front room.’
 
She struggled to put on a dressing gown as she dashed down the stairs, meeting a boy coming up the stairs.
 
‘At least I knew there was one child alive,’ said Ms Lavery.
 
She stood in the doorway and first saw a girl with a head injury.
 
A neighbour was helping another girl out through ‘what would have been the front window’.
 
‘It looked like a bomb had gone off in the front room,’ she added.
 
‘There was smoke everywhere.
 
‘The smell, I can’t even put into words what that was like.
 
‘I saw a black car.
 
‘I knew instantly. It confirmed what I thought.
 
‘I’m trying to clean off some of the blood and dust from the children.’
 
Bruton was sending her messages from the scene. The first of which read: ‘You could have avoided it if you answered me.’
 
The second said: ‘Will be waiting for you in hell.’
 
Ms Lavery said the pair got to know each other on dating website Plenty of Fish in April of last year, before meeting face-to-face to start an eight-month relationship.
 
They saw one another every weekend, with Bruton, who ran Wembley hair and beauty salon Amo treating her house as a ‘home-from-home’.
 
But by January of this year, the relationship was on the rocks, and the atmosphere was ‘strained’ when they met for her birthday meal in London later that month.
 
Ms Lavery said: ‘Before dinner actually arrived, he told me he was going to be famous and in the papers by June.’
 
Bruton claimed he had only intended to kill himself.
 
He said he became suicidal and started hearing voices telling him he was ‘going to die’ in the previous two months .
 
He drank the toxic liquid and parked around the corner from his lover’s home and tried to phone Ms Lavery for support.
 
‘I took some tablets, finished off the anti-freeze and drove around the block two or three times,’ he said.
 
‘Eventually I placed a garden fork between the steering wheel and my neck.
 
‘Something just said to go and drive.
 
‘I just had these voices saying: ‘You’re going to die,’ or: ‘You’re going to kill yourself.’
 
‘I think I used a screwdriver as well on the sun visor.
 
‘I think I rested into my eye socket area.
 
‘I just wanted to die and the only significant person in my life was Tara.
 
‘She’d been the love in my life and she was the only person I was speaking to.’
 
Bruton told how he had previously enjoyed a good lifestyle but was made redundant from his job with a pharmaceutical company in February 2010.
 
He ran the business side of Amo with a partner but that ran into financial difficulties and he defaulted on a string of credit card debts.
 
The businessman, who had property investments in Northampton and Sheffield, said one of the flats went in to negative equity.
 
Bruton, of Harrow Road, Wembley, nw London, denied the attempted murder of one or more of the occupants of (131) South View Avenue, Caversham, criminal damage with intent to endanger life in the same terms, criminal damage reckless as to whether life is endangered and dangerous driving.

He was convicted of criminal damage with intent to endanger life and dangerous driving, and was cleared of attempted murder and the reckless charge.
 
The judge ordered probation and psychiatric reports and remanded Bruton in custody ahead of sentence to October 21.
 
ends