A “highly dangerous” man who claimed he had accidentally killed his ex-girlfriend when throwing an axe has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 32 years for her murder at Preston crown court.
Andrew Burfield admitted killing 33-year-old Katie Kenyon in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, on 22 April, burying her body in a grave he had dug the day before.
The 51-year-old struck Kenyon with an axe at least 12 times in a “ferocious and cruel” attack.
He will spend a minimum of 32 years in prison, a sentence that was reduced by one year because Burfield pleaded guilty on day three of what would have been a three-week trial, after hearing some of the prosecution’s evidence against him.
Sentencing, Mr Justice Goose said Burfield pleaded guilty “not out of any remorse for what you’ve done, but a final recognition that your game plan had failed”.
He said: “This was not an offence in the heat of an argument. It was planned before it was carried out. It involves careful preparation, deception, the destruction of evidence and lies and then an obviously implausible defence, that it was all an accident.”
In arriving at the sentence, Goose said he took into account the injuries to which Burfield had subjected his victim, the concealment of the body, attempts to dispose of the evidence and “the cruel messages you sent to Katie’s children and others pretending that they were from her”.
He added Burfield should prepare himself “for the prospect that you may never be released, such is your dangerousness”.
Kenyon had last been seen on the day of her murder getting into a van in Padiham, East Lancashire, where she lived.
Authorities spent seven days searching for her in a hunt that involved 60 specialist officers from Lancashire constabulary, Lancashire fire and rescue service personnel, mounted police, dog teams, mountain rescue volunteers and drones.
Burfield, of Todmorden Road, Burnley, initially told police he had no idea what had happened to Kenyon, later changing his story to say she died when he accidentally hit her once on the head with the axe, after she dared him to knock a Coca-Cola can out of her hand and he missed.
He was arrested on suspicion of murder on 27 April, five days after Kenyon had disappeared.
Police discovered her body in Gisburn Forest a week after she was murdered in a well-disguised grave in the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which Burfield had dug using ladders and a shovel borrowed from his father the day before.
Officers had been led to the site by the murderer, who had hidden her body so well that forensic investigators said they would have struggled to spot it.
In a victim impact statement, Sarah Kenyon-Holden described her sister as a “fantastic mum” who “was always surrounded by children”.
She said that after Kenyon went missing, her two children “could not make sense of what was going on around them and were asking hundreds of questions”.
“We simply did not have many of the answers,” she added.
Kenyon’s children were forced to move out of their home and are now being raised by Kenyon’s mother, Dawn.
Kenyon-Holden described how friends and family were not able to say goodbye to her sister because of the extent of her injuries, adding: “Katie’s murder has had an indescribable effect on our family emotionally, and things will never be the same again. I cannot put it into words.”
After her statement, people in the public gallery broke into applause and were later admonished by the judge.
