The sister of murdered six-year-old Rikki Neave is keen to speak to his killer after he was finally brought to justice. James Watson was 13 when he lured Rikki into woods in Peterborough and strangled him with his anorak before leaving the body in a star shape in 1994.
He was finally convicted 28 years later after a conviction for sexually assaulting a young man in 2016 linked his DNA to Rikki's murder. Rikki's sister Rochelle, who successfully challenged a 2018 decision to drop the case against Watson due to insufficient evidence, now says she has questions that need answering.
Rochelle, 30, said in quotes reported by the Mirror : “I don’t know why he did it and that’s what I want to know. I haven’t got closure.
“What on earth was he thinking, at 13 years old, to murder my brother? I want to speak to him and ask him to give me answers. But I don’t think I’m ever going to get them.”
Rochelle was two when Rikki died but she remembers her “cheeky, loving” brother. She was left disgusted by Watson's behaviour in the dock during his 11-week trial.
She said: “It was very hard to sit in that courtroom and listen to the evidence. I cried quite a few times, and it made me angry as well.
“He was smug. He was cocky. It was just like ‘The James Watson Show’.
“I found it totally insulting to my family. He rolled his eyes at us and he was laughing at us through the dock window.
“The thing that really got me is that he tried to cry in the box when he was giving his testimony, and it was the most pathetic attempt to cry I’ve ever seen in my life. He wiped his eye one time, wiped his nose, and then carried on. The answers he gave were totally contradicting.”
Earlier this month a jury convicted Watson, now 41, by a majority 10-2 verdict after more than 36 hours of deliberation. He has been described by detectives as a “dangerous predator, fantasist and manipulator”.
Watson will be sentenced on May 9 but the judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, has said his tariff “will be determined largely by the age he was at the time of the offence”. The killer was taken into care as youngster after accusing his dad of assault.
Watson was never arrested at the time of the 1994 murder, despite a witness placing him with Rikki on the day and a complaint to police that he had sexually assaulted a five-year-old boy 18 months earlier. Instead, police decided Rikki and Rochelle’s mum Ruth had killed him.
She was cleared of murder in 1996, but jailed for seven years after admitting child cruelty to him and two of his three sisters. Rochelle, who was adopted by a family in Leicester and never refers to Ruth as ‘mum’, said: “Growing up I was always told that she did it.
“Social services said she’d been acquitted so there was nothing that could be done, which I think triggered something in my brain as a child. I’d think, ‘That’s my brother – why aren’t you doing anything about it? Why? I want to know why?’.
“I was always upset. I grew up as a very angry child because of it. I just wanted justice for my brother.”
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