A man lured a 7-year-old girl away from her home and brutally murdered her more than 30 years ago, a jury has heard. Nikki Allan’s body was found with 37 stab wounds and other injuries in a derelict building in Sunderland in October 1992.
David Boyd, 55, of Chesterton Court, Stockton-on-Tees, denies the murder. Newcastle Crown Court has heard that he is the second man accused of killing Nikki.
George Heron was acquitted of murder by jurors at Leeds Crown Court in 1993, with prosecutor Richard Wright KC saying they “were right to do so”.
‘Jumping to his death
In his opening statement, Wright said that Nikki was taken from outside the apartments where she lived in Wear Garth, Sunderland, at 21:43 BST on 7 October 1992. She was not kidnapped, but rather “lured,” as a witness reported seeing her “jumping” to catch up with a man, jurors heard.
“She was inadvertently jumping to her death,” Wright said.
Nikki was driven to a wasteland by the River Wear, where she was struck over the head and made to bleed. After her, the man forced her through an opening in a boarded-up window in the Old Exchange Building, where he “hit her over the head with a brick” and cracked her skull.
After that, she was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, heart, and lungs.
A postmortem examination found that she had sustained “blunt force trauma” to the head that likely rendered her unconscious before she was stabbed, Wright said. Witnesses heard screams around 10 p.m. which “fixed the time of the murder,” he said.
“Circumstantial but Compelling”
Nikki’s body was dumped in a basement room and discovered the next day by two volunteers who had joined the search for her. The jury was told that the killer was David Boyd, who was 25 years old at the time and was also known as David Smith or David Bell.
The case against the defendant was “circumstantial but compelling,” as his DNA had since been found on Nikki’s clothing, Wright said. Mr Boyd lived in Wear Garth on the same floor as Nikki’s grandparents and was “well known in the family”, the court was told, and his girlfriend was Nikki’s nanny.
Nikki lived with her mother, her stepfather, her sister, and her two half-sisters in a ground-floor apartment, while the defendant lived on the third floor.
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He “knew the layout” of the Old Exchange, the jury heard and had told police he used the same window a few days earlier when he took a boy there to look for pigeons. Wright said the defendant was “the same age” and “bore a striking resemblance” to the man seen with Nikki.
‘Only the murderer knows the motive’
The jury heard that he was the “last man” to tell police that he saw Nikki alive around 9:35 p.m. and created a false alibi for her whereabouts at 10:00 p.m.
“Given that at the time he told the lie, only the killer would have known what time he had killed Nikki and would have appreciated that [22:00] was an important time,” Wright said. He said the prosecution did not have to prove motive, adding: “Only the killer knows precisely why he did what he did to Nikki.”
On the night she was murdered, Nikki was seen playing with other children in the apartments and also at 21:43 outside the Boar’s Head pub. Wright said it was “not unusual” for children to play outside unsupervised when it was dark.
‘No other candidate’
Wright said modern DNA profiling techniques have come a long way since 1992, when “the science [was] in its infancy.” A profile matching Mr. Boyd’s was found in four places on Nikki’s clothing, including the hip of her shorts and under the arm of her T-shirt.
The defendant was not “born and bred” in Sunderland and had no family in the area, the jury heard. Of the hundreds of other men tested, no other profiles matched the DNA on the clothing.
Several factors pointed to Mr. Boyd, the prosecution said, including that he “knew the girl well” and the location of the murder and was a “dead ringer” to an artist’s impression of the man seen with Nikki.
“No other credible candidate for assassination who fits the broader criteria has been identified,” Wright said.
‘Spit from the balcony
Wright said Boyd was not considered a suspect in 1992 but was arrested in April 2018 on suspicion of murder following the DNA discoveries.
Jurors were shown video footage of his arrest at his home in which Boyd said he was not involved in the murder, but then asked, “What evidence does he have anyway?”
Wright asked the jury to consider why he asked that and whether it might be the thoughts of someone who had gotten away with committing murder and now wanted to know what the police had to implicate him.
He said there were inconsistencies between his accounts of his movements that night and those of other witnesses, and when questioned by police about the DNA on Nikki’s clothing, Boyd said he had been spitting from his balcony that night and may have hit Nikki. nikki.
When police said the DNA was on his clothing under her coat, Boyd suggested Nikki may have wiped her hands with her saliva and then smeared it on her clothing, the court heard.
The trial continues.
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