A “pure evil” child killer has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 15 years for the murder of vulnerable six-year-old Rikki Neave in 1994. James Watson was 13 when he lured the schoolboy to woods near his home in Peterborough and strangled him to fulfil a “morbid fantasy” he had told his mother about three days earlier.
He stripped Rikki and posed his naked body in a star shape for sexual gratification, deliberately “exhibiting” him near a children’s woodland den. His sentence was determined largely by the age he was at the time he struck.
The judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, said: “Rikki was a child too willing to trust and engage with strangers. He never had the chance to be happy and lead a normal and fulfilling life. That opportunity was denied to him by his murderer.”
