Satanic rites killer is jailed for life

A satanic killer who stabbed his lover to death after telling her to drink his blood has been jailed for life.

Ivan Griffin, 24, seemed to be ‘possessed by evil’ when he plunged a kitchen knife into Sabrina Mullings’ heart in her flat in Upper Norwood, south London.

Griffin sliced his own chest open before he knifed the 38-year-old victim to death and laid out her naked body on a pink dressing gown in her blood-soaked kitchen.

Ms Mullings’s daughter Hayleigh and her boyfriend Chaise Gore were woken up when the twisted killer shouted about ‘releasing demons’ during the attack at 5.30am on 13 March.

When they rushed out of their bedroom and tried to get into the front room they saw Ms Mullings’s blood seeping under the door.

Police officers found Griffin stalking through the streets wearing nothing but a parka jacket after he fled to Camberwell, southeast London, after the killing.

Griffin claimed he had been possessed when he stabbed Ms Mullings and told jurors he had been ‘a spectator in my own body’ during the attack.

But he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 16 and a half years after an Old Bailey trial.

Hayleigh realised her mother had been stabbed when Griffin emerged from the room and claimed he had cut himself first in a bid to ‘join their blood together’.

Giving evidence, she said: ‘He told her to drink his blood because it would cleanse her soul.

‘I heard my mum trying to talk and she was saying that he was hurting her.

‘She said: “Hayleigh, if you love me you will get an ambulance because he’s stabbed himself.”

‘I could make out what she was saying but it was very, very strained, you could hear she was in pain.’

Hayleigh told jurors Griffin sounded ‘possessed by evil’, describing the incident as ‘something you would get from a horror film’.

She said Griffin saw her when he came out of the front room ‘in a panic’ and claims he asked her: ‘You know I loved her, right?’

‘He pulled up his shirt and told me he had stabbed himself and showed me his wound,’ said Hayleigh.

Jurors heard Griffin fled after spotting that Mr Gore had picked up a screwdriver.

Hayleigh said she then rushed into the lounge and saw her mother’s naked body ‘very neatly placed’ on a pink dressing gown in the adjoining kitchen, which was ‘covered in blood’.

Ms Mullings, who used the lounge as a bedroom, still had a faint pulse but prosecutors say she must have been ‘minutes or seconds from death’.

Paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene and a post-mortem revealed she had suffered two stab wounds inflicted with ‘severe force’.

One fractured her ribcage and punctured her heart, and the other plunged through her abdomen and into her liver.

Griffin was later found wandering the streets of south London covered in blood, wearing just a black parka jacket.

He claimed he had been involved in a scuffle with friends before an officer noticed blood dripping from underneath his jacket.

Griffin started shouting that he was the son of God to passers by before aggressively pulling the handcuffs out of the officer’s grip.

He was then detained under the Mental Health Act.

Footage played to the jury shows Griffin dancing intimately with Ms Mullings to the hit song ‘Danza Kuduro’ by Don Omar and Lucenzo at 6.20pm on 12 March, only eleven hours before he would plunge the knife into her heart.

Griffin had been convicted of attacking his then pregnant girlfriend Micah Coggins in May 2014 after she told police he had an ‘aggressive and controlling side to his personality’.

He was living with a foster family across the road from Ms Mullings’s flat in Ravensdale Gardens when they started seeing each other in September last year.

The victim had been feeling ‘really well’ and ‘positive about her life’ weeks before she was brutally murdered, according to her mum Marian.

Griffin had got engaged to Ms Mullings hours before he plunged a kitchen knife into her heart and liver.

‘We cannot understand how someone could claim to love Sabrina, get engaged to her and then only a few hours later stab her twice with a knife and then leave her alone, naked and to die in pain and leave her own daughter to deal with the situation,’ Marian added.

She said she had bought her daughter the green-handled kitchen knife that killed her as a gift.

The grieving mother said she has nightmares about Ms Mullings ‘lying on the floor wounded and naked surrounded by blood with the green knife beside her’.

‘This is something I don’t feel I will ever get over,’ she said.

‘I don’t think I will ever get these images out of my mind.’

Griffin had admitted stabbing Ms Mullings – but claimed he was not guilty of murder due to diminished responsibility.

But prosecutor Timothy Cray said: ‘There’s no evidence that this defendant suffered from any mental illness before the attack.’

Mr Cray added that since the killing Griffin has tried to ‘disguise what he’s done in the language of mental illness’.

Griffin, of Ravensdale Gardens, Upper Norwood, south London, denied but was convicted of murder.
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