Kelly Anne Bates was just 14 when she first met James Patterson Smith – a man three decades older. They embarked on a dark relationship which would ultimately end in her tragic death
On a brisk Easter Sunday morning in Manchester, a man walked into a police station and said he had a confession to make – he had just killed his girlfriend.
The girl he was talking about was Kelly Anne Bates, a teenager from Hattersley. She was just 14 when she crossed paths with James Patterson Smith, who was 32 years her senior. They met when Kelly was babysitting for one of Smith’s friends and that night, he walked her home ‘to keep her safe’. It was the start of a dark and twisted ‘relationship’.
Smith was a divorced man described by acquaintances as “house-proud” and “well groomed”. He had been married twice to the same woman, Janice Anderson, and throughout both marriages, exhibited extreme jealousy and violence.
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Tina Martin, who had dated Smith in 1970 when she was 20 years old, was another victim of his outbursts. On one occasion, he held Tina’s head underwater in a bathtub. She described herself as a ‘punchbag’ throughout their relationship, and recalled, via crimeandinvestigation.co.uk: “At first, it was now and again, but at the end it was every day.”
In 1993, he began grooming Kelly Anne. She kept the relationship so secretive that her parents Tommy and Margaret Bates were completely unaware of Smith’s existence until she turned 16. In November 1995, when she had left school, Kelly Anne moved in with Smith at his home. She was concealing the age difference between them from her parents. Margaret said of her first meeting with Smith after the two had started living together: “As soon as I saw Smith the hairs on the back of my neck went up. I tried everything I could to get Kelly Anne away from him.”
Over time, Kelly Anne started seeing less and less of her parents, and when she did show up at the family home, she often had visible bruises or bite marks, which she would dismiss as accidents. Eventually, the teen stopped seeing her parents completely. The last time that they saw her in person was on 30th November 1995. Tommy and Margaret had hoped to see their daughter over the Christmas period – but she never showed up. Around the same time, she quit her job. Kelly Anne did remain in contact through phone calls – but those too dropped off.
In March 1996, they received two cards; one was for Tommy’s birthday and the other was for their anniversary. Neither were signed by Kelly Anne. Margaret recalled: “I tried to persuade my husband to go round. I was concerned he had written the cards himself to wind me up or he had her tied up or he’d hurt her in some way that she could not write the cards herself.” Tommy didn’t make the trip – but when her brother tried to see her at the house, Smith said she was not at home. Similarly, when a concerned neighbour asked after Kelly Anne, she was briefly shown at an upstairs window.
It was the following month, on April 16, when Smith went to the police station and made his shock confession. Upon their arrival at his two-bedroom, semi-detached home, which was located in a quiet cul-de-sac, police were directed to the upstairs bedroom. They were met by a horrific scene, with Kelly lying motionless on the floor, and the walls and ceiling splattered with blood. William Lawler, the Home Office pathologist who later examined her body, said: “In my career, I have examined almost 600 victims of homicide but I have never come across injuries so extensive.”
Kelly Anne endured 150 separate injuries across her body, She had been burned, stabbed, scalded and even partially scalped. Her eyes had been gouged out and she had suffered further mutilation to her ears, nose, eyebrows, mouth, lips and genitalia. The pathologist determined that Kelly Anne’s eyes had been removed “not less than five days and not more than three weeks before her death”.
She had been starved, having lost around 20 kg in weight, and had not received water for several days before her passing. During the last month of her life, Kelly Anne had been kept tied up, sometimes tied to a radiator or furniture by her hair, other times by her neck using a ligature. Her cause of death was determined to be drowning.
The trial of James Patterson Smith began on November 12, 1997, at Manchester Crown Court. Prosecutor Peter Openshaw said of the defendant: “It was as if he deliberately disfigured her, causing her the utmost pain, distress and degradation … The injuries were not the result of one sudden eruption of violence; they must have been caused over a long period [and] were so extensive and so terrible that the defendant must have deliberately and systematically tortured the girl.”
Smith, meanwhile, denied murder and claimed Kelly Anne “would put me through hell winding me up”. He also claimed that she had “taunted” him about his dead mother and had “a bad habit of hurting herself to make it look worse on me”. When asked to explain why he had blinded, stabbed, and mutilated his young girlfriend, he wildly claimed she had dared him to do it, challenging him to do her harm. Gillian Mezey, a consultant psychiatrist, told the court that Smith had “a severe paranoid disorder with morbid jealousy” and lived in a “distorted reality”.
It took the jury at Manchester Crown Court just one hour to find 49-year-old Smith guilty of Kelly Anne’s murder. Sentencing him to life imprisonment, the judge, Mr. Justice Sachs, recommended that Smith serve a minimum term of 20 years, saying: “This has been a terrible case; a catalogue of depravity by one human being upon another. You are a highly dangerous person. You are an abuser of women and I intend, so far as it is in my power, that you will abuse no more.”
