BRUTON: PARANOID LOVER ‘TRIED TO KILL FAMILY’

A beauty salon boss warned his ex-lover he would become ‘famous’ shortly before smashing his car through her lounge wall in a failed suicide bid, a court heard today (mon).

Edmund Bruton, 42, hoped to ‘take out as many people possible’ when he drank a litre of antifreeze and tried to murder Tara Lavery while she was at home with four children, jurors heard.

Shortly after the impact Bruton texted Ms Lavery, who he suspected of having an affair, asking her: ‘Tara, will you be waiting for me in hell?’

The estimated 80mph collision, demolished the front wall of the terraced property in South View Avenue, in Caversham, near Reading, Berkshire, and caused thousands of pounds worth of damage on the afternoon of February 26, this year.

Three of the children, who were in the lounge at the time the black Peugeot 206 ploughed in, ‘very fortunately’ escaped with minor injuries, said Charles Ward-Jackson, prosecuting.

Ms Lavery and a fourth child were upstairs at the time, jurors heard.

Bruton, who was also injured after allegedly propping a garden fork between the steering wheel and his neck before the crash, spent a fortnight in hospital.

Mr Ward-Jackson said Bruton had a number of difficulties at the time including his elderly mother being admitted to hospital, financial trouble at his Wembley-based salon, Amo Hair and Beauty, and was facing the breakdown of his relationship.

The prosecutor said: ‘What the prosecution say is that the defendant drove his own motor car at speed, deliberately into a house that was occupied at the time by a mother and four children.

‘He had crashed into the front room of her house, partially demolishing the outside wall of the house.

‘The motor car went into the front room.

‘A great deal of rubble fell into the house.

‘There were three children in the front room.

‘The fourth child was half way up the stairs and Ms Lavery was upstairs.

‘Very fortunately nobody was seriously hurt, but the prosecution invite you to find that the defendant must have been intending to kill some of the people, or at the very least intending to create a risk that somebody would be killed.

‘The real issue in this case may not be whether he was intending to kill himself, but did he want to die alone, or did he want to take out as many people as possible?’

The prosecutor said the couple first contacted each other on a dating website ‘Plenty of Fish’ in January 2010, meeting face-to-face four months later in May.

They saw each other regularly and he would frequently visit her at her home.

But by January of this year the relationship had hit the rocks, and she, along with many of his friends, said he became ‘moody and depressed’ and started ‘dropping hints’ about what was in store.

The prosecutor said on her birthday, when the relationship was on its ‘last legs’ they met for a meal in London.

‘He said words to the effect he was going to do something rather dramatic that would make him famous, or as the prosecution would suggest, infamous.

‘He mentioned he would be in the newspapers as a result of what he did.’

The day before the smash he he told a colleague he had been to Reading to spy on Ms Lavery.

‘He expressed the suspicion that Ms Lavery was seeing another man,’ said the barrister.

‘She noticed that he was behaving oddly.

‘He said ‘big things are going to happen’ and that he had a plan.

‘She was sufficiently concerned that she warned him not to do anything stupid.’

Bruton, of Harrow Road, Wembley, nw London, denies 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.

The trial continues.
ends
mfl