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Couple obsessed with Boyzone member guilty of killing French nanny Couple obsessed with Boyzone member guilty of killing French nanny
(about 2 hours later)
A couple have been found guilty of killing their French nanny over an obsession with a founding member of Boyzone before burning her body on a bonfire in their garden. Caroline Davies and agency
Sabrina Kouider, 35, and Ouissem Medouni, 40, built a warped fantasy around the pop music mogul Mark Walton and accused Sophie Lionnet of being in league with him. A couple, who killed their timid French nanny and threw her body on a bonfire because of their warped fantasy about an ex-Boyzone pop star, have been convicted of murder.
Kouider collapsed in tears as the jury foreman returned the verdicts, while Medouni hung his head. Lionnet’s mother, Catherine Devallonne, also wept as the judge, Nicholas Hilliard QC, said he was sure the allegations against her daughter had no truth to them. Sabrina Kouider, 35, and Ouissem Medouni , 40, beat, starved and tortured au pair Sophie Lionnet, 21, after falsely accusing her of being in league with music mogul Mark Walton, who was Kouider’s ex-boyfriend.
In the weeks leading up to her death last September, the couple beat, starved and tortured the 21-year-old au pair by putting her head under water until she “confessed”. The couple killed her in the bath then burned her body in their garden near Wimbledon, south west London, as they barbecued chicken nearby. When neighbours alerted fire fighters, Medouni tried to pass off the charred remains as a sheep.
Having killed her in the bath, the pair threw her body on a bonfire in the garden of their home near Wimbledon, south-west London. When firefighters were alerted by neighbours to smoke, Medouni tried to pass off the remains as a sheep’s body. Kouider collapsed in tears and Medouni hung his head as the jury foreman returned guilty verdicts to murder for both. They each blamed the other for Lionnet’s death.
Kouider claimed to police that Lionnet had run off with Walton, in an attempt to frame him for her disappearance. The defendants later admitted disposing of the body but denied Lionnet’s murder, blaming each other for her death. The two-month Old Bailey trial, which was described as stranger than fiction, heard how fashion designer Kouider was fixated with Walton and believed Lionnet was colluding with him to drug and molest the family.
An Old Bailey jury found both of them guilty of murder following a two-month trial. The couple’s “unhealthy, myopic, all-consuming and groundless” obsession with with the former boy band singer, had deprived them of reason and turned their nanny into “something less than human” prosecutor Richard Horwell QC, had told jurors.
Lionnet’s parents travelled from France to see the evidence as it unfolded. The court heard how Kouider, a fashion designer, was fixated with Walton, her ex-boyfriend. Kouider reported him to police more than 30 times and received a caution for calling him a paedophile on a fake Facebook profile. They tortured her by dunking her head under water into making an untrue “confession” which they filmed before killing her.
She also accused him of sexually abusing a cat, using black magic and hiring a helicopter to spy on her. Lionnet’s mother, Catherine Devallonne, wept as judge Nicholas Hilliard QC said claims the couple made against Lionnet had “no truth whatsoever”. The jury heard she had never even met Walton, who left the UK in 2015.
Giving evidence, Walton, who is based in LA, said he had been in love with Kouider but she would “flip” and “go crazy” for no reason. Another ex-boyfriend, Anthony Francois, described her as a “lunatic, fickle and unstable”. But Kouider, a mother of two, was convinced her ex-boyfriend was colluding with her nanny and swept Medouni up into the fantasy.
Kouider, a mother of two, created a fantasy, casting Walton as an evil villain who seduced Lionnet with sex and promises of Hollywood stardom. Medouni, a banker, became an ardent believer in Kouider’s twisted reality and they interrogated Lionnet for hours to get to “the truth”. She had waged a five year war on Dublin-born Walton following their split, reporting him to police more than 30 times, with outlandish claims of black magic and sexual abuse of a cat, falsely accusing him on Facebook of being a paedophile, and claiming he had hired a helicopter to spy on her.
Jurors heard more than eight hours of recordings in which Lionnet was slapped, likened to a Nazi collaborator and called “worse than a murderer” by her tormentors. Walton had shouldered the ludicrous slurs and responded with “integrity and honesty”, the prosecution said, willingly travelling from LA to give evidence.
Kouider, who claimed to know influential people including the US president, Donald Trump, threatened to have her locked up and even marched her to a police station. The victim’s mother had begged Kouider to send her daughter home but she refused. The murder bore the hallmarks of a psychosis known as “folie a deux” - or a “madness of two” - which is defined as a delusion shared from one individual to another, with Kouider the driving force and Medouni the willing party.
In her final days, Lionnet was hit with an electrical cable and beaten so badly she had five broken ribs and a cracked breastbone. In a filmed “confession”, she said she had drugged Medouni so Walton could sexually assault him. Within hours, she was dead. Kouider created a fantasy world casting Walton as an evil villain who seduced Lionnet with sex and promises of Hollywood stardom. Medouni, a former banker, became an ardent believer of Kouider’s twisted reality, the jury heard.
According to Kouider, Medouni tortured her in the bath, then demanded they have sex as the dead body lay nearby. She told jurors: “He was putting her head under the water and sometimes he would put water on the towel in her mouth. It was getting really mad.” Born in Algeria , Kouider grew up in Paris, where aged 18, she met Medouni, a fellow French Algerian five years her senior, at a fun fair. Their on-off relationship, which lasted 17 years ending in the Old Bailey dock, was dysfunctional and turbulent, and marred by Kouider’s irrational jealousy and violence.
Before the trial, Medouni claimed Lionnet died by accident after he punched her during an interrogation in the bath. He offered to admit manslaughter but later retracted his confession, saying he made it to protect his wife, who has been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. When Kouider went to work as a nanny in London, Medouni followed, working as a financial analyst for French bank Societe Generale in London until redundancy in 2012. He had “punched above his weight” in his love for her, according to the prosecution. The balding 40-year-old, known as Sam, was weak and submissive. When she went off with other men, he waited in the wings for her to return.
In his evidence, Medouni claimed his wife had woken him up in a state saying “what have I done, what have I done”. He was shocked to find Lionnet unconscious in the bath and tried to revive her, he claimed. Kouider was involved in pyramid selling for a telecommunications company when she met Walton in a bank in Notting Hill, London in 2011. Walton, who now lives in Los Angeles, fell head over heels in love, he told the court, but once the “love goggles” wore off, found her to be calculating, manipulative and likely to flip and go “crazy” in a moment.
He said Kouider refused to call 999 and told him they would burn her body instead. A witness in the house, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, placed both defendants in the bathroom with Lionnet on the night of her death. The witness described hearing Lionnet screaming and splashing in the bath as they said to “breathe”. After they split, she went back to Medouni.
Richard Horwell QC, prosecuting, told jurors that neither were prepared to admit the truth – that they killed her out of revenge and punishment. He said their “unhealthy, myopic, all-consuming and groundless” obsession with Walton had deprived them of reason and turned their nanny into “something less than human”. The trial heard she had depression and borderline personality disorder. One ex-boyfriend, Anthony Francois, described her as “fickle” and a “lunatic” who would lie, manipulate and target the weak. She could lasht out at complete strangers, grabbing women’s hair just for looking at her, he said .
The judge is expected to sentence the pair on 26 June at the Old Bailey. Lionnet, 21, who was pretty, shy and an “ingenue” was “ripe for exploitation” by her violent and oppressive employers, the prosecutor said. Born in Troyes, northern France, she at first seemed “happy” in her first job, but before her death, seemed “fed up” and wanted to go back to her family in France.
She was beaten, interrogated and accused of stealing a diamond pendant. Kousider hit her with an electrical cord, and either she or Medouni broke five ribs and her breastbone as the violence escalated last September. She was in such a state, the defendants refused to allow her out of their two-bedroomed flat for the last 12 days of her life.
A video made hours before her death showed her emaciated, broken and terrified. She suffered a broken jaw. The exact cause of death could not be established. The prosecution said she died in the bath following water torture involving both Kouider and Medouni, though neither admitted being responsible for her injuries.
When her curled up remains were uncovered in a bonfire, firefighters thought it was the body of a child because she was so small and frail.
She had been murdered out of “revenge and punishment” over a man whom she had never even met.
Aisling Hosein, from the Crown Prosecution Service said while “only Kouider and Medouni know exactly how they killed Sophie”, they were “both jointly involved and came up with a plan to try and destroy her body and escape responsibility for this horrendous crime”.
The pair are expected to be sentenced at the Old Bailey on June 26.
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