"A man accused of murdering his six-year-old daughter in a fit of rage
has described freezing in shock the moment he found her collapsed on
the floor of her bedroom, and expressed regret for not phoning an
ambulance until some hours later. “I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe properly,” Ben Butler told a
jury at the Old Bailey. “I didn’t help the way I should have helped. I
tried to help, I tried to shake her. She didn’t wake, she didn’t respond
to what I did. I tried to breathe in her mouth, it didn’t work. It just
took the wind of my sails. I still don’t know why I didn’t do more.” Butler, 36, who denies killing his daughter Ellie, said he should
have called an ambulance when he could not revive her, but he collapsed
on the floor himself. Giving his own account for the first time of the day his daughter was
found with what a pathologist has said were “catastrophic” head
injuries of a type typically seen after a high-speed crash, Butler said
he panicked when he found Ellie unconscious and he lay down on the
floor. Later he called his partner, Jennie Gray, and asked her to come
home. Jurors have previously heard that an ambulance was called at 2.45pm
on 28 October 2013, two hours after Butler called Gray demanding she
return home from work. “I should have told Jennie, she would have told
me to call the ambulance,” Butler said. The jury heard that Butler had planned a “lazy” day with his daughter
that Monday and was due to go shopping for a Halloween costume. That
morning, he said, he gave Ellie a jam sandwich, sweets and crisps and
left her in her room while he went back to bed. At 11.30 am he woke up, did some housework and then called up to Ellie
and another child in the house offering them cake, he said. When he
received no reply, he called again and then went upstairs, the jury
heard. His daughter’s bedroom door was shut. Butler said he opened the
door quickly and at first saw the other child sitting on the sofa. “Then
I looked down and there was Ellie on the floor,” he said, describing
how her feet were pointing towards a wardrobe. He said he took the other
child to another room. Asked by his barrister, Icah Peart QC, what he did next, Butler replied: “I walked out the door … and shut the door behind me.” Asked whether he had asked the other child what had happened, Butler
said he had not. “The only way I can describe it is if you have a car
accident – everything went slow. I felt like all the wind had come out
of me and I went downstairs and I lay on the floor,” he said. “I was crying, it took me a while to get up off the floor. I tried
desperately hard to erase that memory, so it’s not easy for me.” At some
point, he said, he contacted Gray and told her her needed her to come
home immediately, though he did not say why. “Can you remember what she said?” Peart asked. “She didn’t know until she came home there was anything wrong,” the defendant said. The court heard that Butler then rang a friend, Ian Hudson, whom he
had phoned in 2007 when Ellie had fallen ill with what was originally
thought to be shaken baby syndrome. Butler was jailed for assaulting
her, but his conviction was overturned in 2010. Butler said he did not
tell his friend what had happened. Instead they had a brief conversation
about a bank account. Butler said he put a towel stained with some of Gray’s blood and some
other items including a diary of hers in the bin because he sensed he
would be blamed by police because of the previous overturned conviction
for assaulting Ellie Earlier,
he described the prosecution team as the “chuckle brothers” and said
they had concocted the charges of murder and child cruelty. He said
fractures found on Ellie’s head had been caused while she was in foster
care, at her grandfather’s or when she was in the care of the local
authority. He told the jury that Ellie was a “unique” baby who had been damaged
at birth. He said an untreated broken shoulder discovered in the
postmortem was not something he knew about. She had fallen over the
family dog and was concussed but her arm was not in pain, he said. He
did not seek medical treatment because after recovering from initial
concussion she appeared to improve. Butler and Gray both deny child cruelty over the shoulder injury. He said he was shocked when he was arrested. “No one actually knew
what was wrong then,” he said, “and the postmortem didn’t know what was
wrong for four months, but the decision was made to arrest me that
night, they [Sutton police] jumped, they thought they had won the
lottery”. Asked what he thought of medical expert opinion that he either hit
Ellie with an object or hit her head against the wall, he said: “It’s
just bullshit. I’m not guilty of murder, I’m not guilty of manslaughter.
I’m not accepting things that I haven’t done. I couldn’t do it.” He said his biggest mistake was not calling an ambulance, and that
one mistake had multiplied into a personal catastrophe. “I realised I
hadn’t been watching the [children]. I had been asleep. I didn’t call
the ambulance for ages. One mistake leads to the next thing. Panicking,
you’re not doing the right thing, [this] leads to more problems. I
should have told Jennie, she would have told me to call the ambulance, I
just didn’t.” Before finishing his examination of his client, Peart asked: “Did you kill Ellie Butler?” Butler replied: “Absolutely not, 100% not.” “Did you strike her any way?” Peart asked. “There’s no mark, there’s no noise in the house, there’s no marks on
Ellie that look inflicted – there’s a small bruise. I am not guilty of
murder or manslaughter. I didn’t cause that injury,” Butler said. He told jurors: “The biggest mistake we ever made was trying to cover up what we did wrong.” Under cross-examination prosecutor Ed Brown, QC, accused Butler of
being “calculating”, a liar, and a violent man who would do or say
anything to save his own skin.He answered “no” to each assertion. “You didn’t mind Ellie lying dead somewhere in that house, so long as
it gave you time to cover up your terrible crimes,” Brown said to
Butler. “It wasn’t like that,” he replied."The trial continues.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/may/17/muder-accused-ben-butler-shock-daughters-death-court
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