There was just one word as Olivia Pratt-Korbel’s courageous mother left Manchester crown court clutching a pink teddy bear on Thursday afternoon. “Ecstatic,” she said, smiling, possibly for the first time in weeks, after a jury returned guilty verdicts against her daughter’s killer.
Cheryl Korbel, 46, had attended every day of the harrowing four-week trial and was a beacon of dignity and resilience throughout, even when she crossed paths with the murderer’s family in the corridors.
Jurors are not supposed to decide criminal verdicts on emotion – they do so on evidence – and so they were told very little about the young girl at the heart of this horrendous case.
Many people knew her as Liv, the bright, chatty nine-year-old who loved pink and spent her final summer riding the bike she had been given for her birthday on the Liverpool street where she was murdered.
She was “nine going on 19”, said her mother in the days after her death. “Although her life was short, her personality certainly wasn’t and she lived it to the most she could, and would blow people away with her wit and kindness.”
At Olivia’s funeral, where her white coffin was decorated with a rainbow and pink butterflies, Cheryl told the packed church how her daughter “would have made a great lawyer because she had an answer for everything”.
She loved coming home from St Margaret Mary’s Catholic junior school and telling her mother about all the other children “playing up” – when she would be reminded to let the teachers do their job and not to do it for them.
“There were many times she would amaze me with the answers she would give back and I’d have to remind her how old she was. This was often when we would see her sassy, diva side,” Cheryl told the mourners.
Her life was brutally cut short on the night of 22 August last year when Olivia, who had been struggling to sleep in the heat, came downstairs after hearing shouts in the street outside.
She said “Mummy, I’m scared” just before a masked gunman opened fire towards her front door, cutting her down on the stairs in her pyjamas.
Cashman, 34, is expected to be jailed for at least 30 years when he is sentenced on Monday. No amount of prison time will bring consolation to the family at the heart of this tragedy.
