A man who murdered a young mum after discovering she planned to leave him, then claimed he couldn’t remember it, has been locked up for life.
Nigel Diakite launched a brutal attack on 20-year-old N'Taya Elliott-Cleverley after she planned to leave him.
He strangled her to death with a skipping rope in bed at their home in Wavertree, Liverpool, while the couple's then four-month-old baby was sleeping in a cot next to them.
Diakite, then 19, claimed he couldn't remember carrying out the killing at their Wavertree home - despite confessing to it afterwards, The Liverpool Echo reports.
The killer blamed mental health problems and even accused his victim of assaulting him, in the early hours of Friday, January 29, 2021.
But a jury in a distressing 10-day trial at Liverpool Crown Court unanimously found the now 20-year-old guilty of murder.
And today, High Court Judge Justice Stephen Morris, locked Diakite up for life for the “ferocious attack”, with a minimum sentence of 19 years in custody.
This would be minus the 415 days he has already spent in custody, the judge asserted.
Justice Morris said aggravating features that took the sentence beyond a 15-year starting point were the fact that Diakite’s baby daughter was in the cot beside the bed and Diakite’s history of previous domestic violence.
The judge said in mitigation he must take into account his age, the fact he was suffering from PTSD arising from his experiences before arriving in the UK and those experiences themselves, in addition to the fact he had no previous convictions - all of which was balanced against his conduct on October 6, 2020.
This was the date Justice Morris says police were called to the flat.
Diakite had assaulted her and he said he had put his fingers down her throat.
The day previously he had grabbed her arm, the court heard - but the next day she made a retraction statement.
Running through a timeline of the horrific series of events, Justice Morris said that at around 2am on January 29, 2021, Miss Elliott-Cleverley was discovered in her home, in bed, in a pool of blood.
She was discovered by Diakite's support worker, Celia Cole, who visited their home after becoming concerned by phone calls from him.
He had left two messages, the second at 1.49am, in which he said "sorry for everything".
When Ms Cole rang him back, he claimed Miss Elliott-Cleverley had gone to her mum's house and had left him with the baby.
He told her his girlfriend had been drinking and "beat him", before adding he was going to jail and was going to kill himself.
When Ms Cole arrived, with the help of worried neighbours, she found Miss Elliott-Cleverley's body in a pool of blood.
The couple's baby was sleeping in a nearby cot and Diakite, also known as Mohammed Diakite, was nowhere to be found.
Justice Morris said that sometime around midnight Diakite had “subjected [Miss Elliott-Cleverley] to a vicious and sustained attack” of punching and then strangled her.
He said their four-month-old baby daughter was lying asleep in a cot next to the bed.
Emergency services were called and just after 2am she was pronounced dead.
A post-mortem revealed 56 separate sites of injury to her body including injuries to her neck consistent with strangulation with a ligature.
The cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation.
A skiing rope was discovered in the flat.
He said: “She was subjected to a brutal and terrifying attack that came about without warning.”
Meanwhile, Diakite was travelling in a taxi to Liverpool One Bus Station, on the way making a phone call to his friend Ismael Donzo, who began recording the conversation.
Ian Unsworth, QC, prosecuting, told the jury that during that 36-minute call "the defendant confessed to killing N'Taya".
He said: "He told Mr Donzo that he had become angry, he did everything with his hand, he punched her several times and that she had been bleeding from the nose.
"He claimed that she had been insulting him and sought to justify what he had done.
"He said that he didn't want her to call the police and he go to jail.
"So he decided to finish it. He said that she was dead."
The prosecutor added: "There was a confession in the clearest possible terms.
"He decided to 'finish it'. In other words, to kill her."
The trial heard Diakite, who was taken to police by Mr Donzo and then arrested, denied this, despite a history of alleged violence to his partner.
The asylum seeker, from the Ivory Coast, was previously accused by Miss Elliott-Cleverley of assaulting her during an argument in October 2020, just two weeks after their baby was born.
Diakite told jurors that, on the night of January 28, the mum had wanted to have sex and he didn't, so her "mood changed".
Diakite said he was exercising with a skipping rope, so he put the rope on their bed, then picked up their crying baby and started giving her milk.
He said Miss Elliott-Cleverley was swearing at him and she put her finger in his eyes and slapped him in the head, so he put the baby down in her cot.
Asked what happened next, Diakite said: "Then I found myself in the hospital."
He said putting their daughter down was the last thing he remembered.
Diakite, who was on medication for depression, said he often had thoughts of suicide, heard voices and hallucinated.
However, a doctors' assessment after his arrest found Diakite was a risk of self-harm, but not psychotic at the time.
Of the defendant's claims not to recall the events, Mr Unsworth said: "It is, we suggest, a cynical and wholly false attempt to hoodwink you.
"It is designed to use what undoubted mental health issues he had to his own advantage."
Under cross-examination, Diakite denied "pretending" not to remember, putting on an "act", or trying to make his partner "look bad".
He said "nobody" removed Miss Elliott-Cleverley's SIM card from her mobile phone and he didn't know who "smashed" the device.
Jurors took just two hours and 15 minutes to find Diakite guilty.
A statement from Joseph Elliott, Miss Elliott-Cleverley’s dad, said he could not describe the pain he was feeling and didn’t “want to believe that she has gone, as it is too heartbreaking for me to deal with”.
Mr Elliott said his daughter was just starting her life, she was only 20 and had her whole life in front of her.
He said: “My granddaughter has lost her Mummy and we have lost a wonderful, kind-hearted daughter and sister.
"We are all living a nightmare without our N’Taya, the pain is never going to stop, he has destroyed our lives."
Concluding, Justice Morris said Miss Elliott-Cleverley, who leaves behind a daughter just 18 months old, was much loved.
Justice Morris said each of her family who read victim statements provided eloquent and moving testimony of the present and future impact on her daughter of the loss of her mother at the hands of her father.
Justice Morris said: “The loss of N’Taya is a loss that will stay with each of them for the rest of their lives.”
