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What prompted this act of evil?
James Crisp6/12/2006
LOCAL thug Lee Cotterill was an unemployed 22-year-old "gangster" living with elderly relatives when voices in his head told him to kill his neighbour - a kind old lady who treated him like a grandson when he was a child.
He had often visited Lilian Lovatt's home as a boy and would watch, enraptured, as she fed the hedgehogs in her back garden.
But as Cotterill - staying with greatgrandparents after his parents divorced and shuttling between Kingsway and a Macclesfield address - grew older, he stopped going round.
The former Ryles Park pupil was infamous in the village for hanging around and giving it the big "I am".
One resident, who did not want to be named, said: "He wanted to be seen as a gangster. He had a bit of a reputation for being into drugs."
A young woman, who attended the same school said: "Lee was always a bit weird, quiet - a loner."
Cotterill had never displayed a propensity for violence and had not been diagnosed as mentally ill - that only happened after his arrest.
As a result he had no treatment and no medication to address his growing insanity. He was a timebomb.
On the night of the attack, Cotterill had argued with his greatgrandparents before storming out of their house and over to Lilian's with murder on his mind.
It had been a very long time since his last visit the fateful night he knocked on Lilian's door. He was hooded, gloved and armed with a meat cleaver.
After tricking his way inside the home by telling Lilian there was a prowler in her back garden he attacked.
Lilian's son, Mark said: "She hadn't seen him for a very long time but she did used to watch him every now and again when he was a kid.
"Mum only let him in because she thought he was there to help.
"He finally let her go when she screamed out: 'Stop it Lee, you'll give me another heart attack'. Then she called me."
Astonishingly, Cotterill later swaggered into a local newsagents, ordered a pack of ten Lambert and Butler cigarettes and, gesturing back towards the crime scene, where police cars had gathered, arrogantly asked: "What's going on back there?"
At first he denied any involvement. But shortly afterwards he confessed to a cellmate that he had tried to chop off Lilian's hands to get her jewellery - an idea he got from television.
On Thursday, November 30, at Chester Crown Court it was accepted that a healthier-looking Cotterill, no longer short-haired, and having gained weight, was a paranoid schizophrenic and the order for his horrifying crime began.
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8/12/2006 at 12:45