Judith Fox: Jurors retire to consider mum murder case

Jurors have retired to consider whether a woman killed her mother a month before the dismembered body was found.

Lucy Fox, who is at the centre of trial-of-facts proceedings, has been deemed unfit to enter pleas and the case is being heard in her absence.

The partial remains of her mother, Judith Fox, were found in Shropshire in July 2020, about a month after she was last seen at her home in the county.

Prosecutors say Ms Fox stabbed Mrs Fox at the house then disposed of the body.

The 39-year-old accused, of Bernards Hill, Bridgnorth, Shropshire, is charged with murder and also arson with intent to endanger life in connection with a fire at her brother's house.

She has not pleaded to either, and the jury is not seeking to ascertain guilt but establish whether Ms Fox carried out the killing and set the blaze.

During the hearing, jurors were told Ms Fox had been seen on CCTV buying knives and driving to her mother's house in Shifnal on 12 June 2020, the last day the 65-year-old was seen alive.

Police officers were sent to the house on Haughton Drive in the early hours of 14 June following a concerned call from Mrs Fox's son, Nick.

Ms Fox allegedly started a fire at his home shortly before he called officers. In body-worn camera footage shown to the court, she told police that her mother had an accident, was dead and she had killed her.

The officers told jurors how Ms Fox had seemed increasingly confused and later claimed it was a joke.

"Whatever difficulties she was labouring under, she killed her mother," Kevin Hegarty QC, prosecuting, said in his closing statement.

The defence reminded jurors how the "words echoed around an empty dock", adding Ms Fox had been "all but anonymous" during her trial and had not been able to give her own account.

Ms Fox, her barristers said, had a history of threatening to take her own life, and put it to the jury that her mother's death could have been the result of "circumstances of accident, not malice".

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