Yahoo Finance Vigilante who killed a man he wrongly believed was a paedophile has murder conviction upheld
The murder conviction of a former altar boy who carried out the vigilante killing of a man he wrongly believed was a paedophile has been upheld by judges.
Christopher Hunnisett bludgeoned Peter Bick with a hammer and strangled him with a shoelace, just months after being released from prison over another killing.
He was branded an “extremely dangerous man” when he was convicted of murdering Mr Bick in 2012 and sentenced to life in prison.
Court of Appeal judges were asked to review the conviction and consider if Hunnisett was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the attack.
But Dame Victoria Sharp, President of the Queen’s Bench Division, sitting with Mrs Justice May and Mrs Justice Stacey, today upheld the murder conviction and said points raised in “fresh evidence” had been considered at the original trial.
“The fresh evidence presented in support of this appeal revisits in all essential respects the same ground as the evidence presented at the appellant’s 2012 trial”, she said.
“We are not persuaded either that the account now provided by the appellant and upon which the new diagnosis is apparently based, is credible.
“It was, as we have said, very significantly undermined by other evidence presented at trial.”
Hunnisett, who underwent a sex change in prison and is now called Crystal, was first jailed in 2002 over the death of 81-year-old Reverend Ronald Glazebrook, who he had been lodging with as a teenager in St Leonards on Sea, in East Sussex.
The vicar’s severed head and limbs were discovered in a sports bag on a traffic island in Hastings, and his torso was found near Eastbourne.
Hunnisett was convicted at trial and spent eight years in prison before his murder conviction was quashed on appeal and the case was sent for a retrial.
Jurors then cleared Hunnisett of the murder, after he described punching Rev Glazebrook to stop him touching him in the bath, finding the pensioner dead the next morning. Four months after being released from prison, Hunnisett attacked supermarket worker Mr Bick in Bexhill.
Hunnisett had drawn up a “hit list” of targets for an attack while in prison, and on release he set-up an online “honeytrap”.
Mr Bick used social media and dating websites to meet men, but the court heard there was “not a shred of evidence” that was a paedophile.
At his trial, Hunnisett denied murder on the grounds of loss of control and diminished responsibility but was convicted and jailed for life with a minimum 18-year sentence. A 2015 appeal failed, and in 2018 Hunnisett was transferred to a secure hospital from prison.
The case was then revisited following an intervention by the Criminal Case Review Commission (CCRC), which put forward evidence on Hunnisett’s mental health and suggested murder should be replaced with a manslaughter conviction.
But the appeal was resisted by the CPS, who said “extreme caution” should be taken with Hunnisett’s diagnosis “given her tendency to fantasise and lie”.
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