A police community support officer was ambushed while out walking her dog and subjected to “a brutal and fatal attack”, jurors have been told.
Julia James, 53, was found dead after she had gone out with her Jack Russell, Toby, near Ackholt Wood, close to her home in Snowdown, Kent, on 27 April last year.
Jurors at Canterbury Crown Court were on Monday told 22-year-old defendant Callum Wheeler was seen “roaming” around the area with a metal railway jack 24 hours before the attack and had previously been seen by Ms James and her husband Paul.
Prosecutor Alison Morgan QC told jurors Wheeler, from Aylesham, Kent, now accepts he killed Ms James but denies murder.
Ms Morgan said walking speed and heart rate data captured on Ms James’s Apple watch showed she had taken her usual walking route on the day she died before her heart rate suddenly spiked at 2.30pm and she took a detour out of the woods and along the edge of a field.
The prosecution alleges Ms James was at this point attempting to escape Wheeler, who was chasing her.
“It is likely that as she ran she fell either from the first blow from her attacker or by tripping because we know from pathology evidence that her left wrist was fractured,” Ms Morgan told the court.
“Once down on the ground she was then subjected to what the pathologist who examined her body described as a violent and sustained blunt force trauma assault to the head, especially concentrated on the top and the back of the head.”
The watch data showed there was no further movement after 2.35pm and Ms James’s last heart rate was recorded at 2.43pm, the court was told.
Ms Morgan said the evidence suggests Ms James’s attacker “was waiting in the woods for someone to attack and then ambushed her”.
“Julia tried to escape her attacker but she was subjected to a brutal and fatal attack,” she said.
“She suffered catastrophic injuries and died where she fell.”
Ms Morgan said it is the prosecution’s case “that there is a large body of evidence from a variety of sources that demonstrate that the attacker was this defendant Callum Wheeler”.
She told the court: “Although he denied responsibility for the killing for some time, he does now accept that he was the person that killed Julia James, however he does not accept that he is guilty of the offence of murder.”
Canterbury Crown Court was told Ms James had seen Wheeler a number of times in the woods where she was killed in the months prior to her death.
Ms Morgan told the jury Wheeler repeatedly visited Ackholt Wood, where Ms James would often walk her dog.
She said: “On one of those earlier occasions when he was in Ackholt Wood, he saw and was seen by Julia James herself.”
She later added Ms James “was herself aware of the presence of a strange male”, who she described to her husband as a “really weird dude”.
She later pointed out the male, alleged to have been Wheeler, to Mr James during a walk together in February 2021, around two months before her death.
Ms Morgan told the jury Ms James was killed with a metal railway jack, which was later found inside the defendant’s bedroom.
She said it was impossible to know how long the defendant remained at the scene, however it is alleged he pulled up some long grass to cover up a pool of blood and left soon after the attack.
The prosecutor said the pathologist who carried out a post-mortem examination of Ms James’s body concluded the catastrophic head and brain injuries she suffered would have been “completely unsurvivable even with immediate medical intervention” and that she would have died very quickly.
She added: “He said there were no signs of sustained or violent sexual assault. However the lack of such injuries would not necessarily rule this out.”
The jury heard that the day after Ms James’s death, Wheeler was seen walking around with a blue holdall with a long object protruding from it, covered with a Tesco carrier bag.
Ms Morgan said: “The defendant went out again carrying the weapon that he had used to kill Julia James. Why he did that is known only to him.
“It could be that he was goading the police who were in the vicinity, or it could be that he was looking for somewhere to dispose of the weapon.”
Witnesses who saw Wheeler included a gamekeeper called Gavin Tucker, who had seen him in the area in September of the previous year.
“When he spoke to him on 28 April 2021, Wheeler said he was new to the area and hurried off. Mr Tucker took a short video clip and still of Wheeler, that was later used in a police appeal, and called police. PC Scott James later attended and saw a man running in to the hedge line.
Ms Morgan said: “The community in Aylesham you may think at that time was shocked at Julia James’s death, many were seeking to assist the police in whatever way they could with information. Yet here was the defendant playing games.”
On 7 May last year the police circulated the photo Mr Tucker had taken and Wheeler was identified by a member of the public.
When officers went to arrest him at his home in Aylesham, he barricaded himself in his bedroom.
Ms Morgan told the court: “He made comments that amounted to clear denials, saying he was not guilty and someone had ratted on him. But then other comments saying things like ‘sometimes I do things I cannot control’.”
He said to one officer: “F***** bastards...five of you ran in here and I didn’t even use a f****** weapon, when there was a weapon right there”, allegedly referring to the railway jack.
Several members of Mrs James’s family attended court to hear the prosecution open the case.
The trial continues.
