Full story of shocking Watlington woods 'murder' trial

Within 24 hours the mother was dead – and the son in police custody on suspicion of her murder.

Her death was of the most violent nature. The details of her killing were so distressing that would-be jurors at Oxford Crown Court were last week offered the opportunity to recuse – or excuse – themselves before the trial began.

Carole Wright was beaten with sticks, stamped on and her eyes removed. One of her eyeballs was placed in her upper airway while she was still alive. The other was later found in her son’s camouflage jacket pocket.

On Friday, son Daniel O’Hara Wright was found not guilty of murdering the 62-year-old mother he loved above all others. Jurors took two-and-a-half hours to deliver the verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity.

O’Hara Wright was not in the dock to hear the verdict. An inpatient at Broadmoor secure psychiatric hospital, he is expected to attend a court hearing later this month to decide on whether he should remain at the high-security facility in Dartmoor.

Forensic investigators at Watlington Hill in Oxfordshire after the body of a woman was discovered at the National Trust estate

‘He truly loved her’

Born in August 1997, Daniel O’Hara Wright’s early years were unremarkable. His siblings, Martin and Michelle, were older. Dad Miles, a financial adviser, worked long hours at home.

Carole, his mother, worked with children – firstly at a special educational needs unit and, before taking early retirement, managing a children’s centre. She was a ‘caring and gentle person’, her husband said.

Miles Wright told the jury: “Daniel and Carole got on very, very well. I have never known them even to have an argument. Daniel would often leave notes for his mum around the house, telling her he loved her.”

Daniel’s sister, Michelle, said in the days after Carole’s death he was so protective of his mother that she ‘couldn’t understand what’s happened’. Increasingly obsessed by conspiracy theories and an interest in nature, he had thrown away soap and washing tablets out of concern that the chemicals in them would harm her.

Police at Watlington Hill. Above, the smashed windscreen

During lockdown, the pair went on long rambles together. Carole had taken early retirement and Daniel, having previously had a job at PC World, was not working.

The day before her death they travelled to Virginia Water, Surrey, and posed together for smiling selfies.

Closing his case to the jury on Friday, it was to these images that O’Hara Wright’s barrister Mark Graffius QC turned.

“This photograph was taken as you know just the day before the 23rd and it encapsulates you may think what everyone knew; that Daniel truly loved his mother,” he said.

“And that evidence is a critical starting point for you in your deliberations. As his father told the police, Daniel and Carole got on very, very well.”

Family and friends spoke of Daniel as a gentle man, who’d never shown any signs of violence towards his mother or anyone else, Mr Graffius said.

Quoting dad Miles’ words that ‘there was absolutely no logical reason’ to explain why his son killed Carole on October 23, the barrister concluded: “You have [there] in truth the very heart of this case.”

‘The most psychotic person I’ve seen in 30 years’

If Daniel loved his mother, as everyone said, why did he kill her in a brutal attack that left her with 93 separate ‘areas of injury’?

The answer, as the jury heard, was that Daniel did not believe he was killing his mother.

Later, he would tell psychiatrists he believed he was attacking a demon – the Old Testament she-devil Lilith – after becoming convinced she was trying to lure him to his death.

“He realised she was called Lilith because her hair suddenly turned from grey to red while they were walking,” forensic psychiatrist Dr Nicholas Kennedy told the jury.

“He started beating her and as he did he felt overcome and possessed by what he described as a crazy energy. At this point he believed that he was assaulting a demon and not a human being and not his mother.”

In medical terms, O’Hara Wright was suffering first-instance psychosis, a psychotic episode that had dreadful – and fatal – consequences.

His barrister compared it to the eruption of a volcano.

And just like a volcanic explosion there had been the ‘rumblings’ of an earthquake in the months leading up to the tragedy.

For years, his behaviour had increasingly become more and more erratic. He converted to a strict form of veganism, grew interested in Gnosticism – the belief that humans contain part of God – and became obsessed with the QAnon cult, believing former US president Donald Trump was the ‘saviour’ and turning cross when family members challenged him about it.

At Christmas 2019, he laughed hysterically at the dinner table after an accidental fire was discovered in his makeshift bedroom and studio.

At the end of the year he eschewed a family ski holiday to Austria, later telling doctors he had ‘spiritual work’ to do in Uxbridge. On March 6, 2020, his older sister was shocked when she took a newly shaven-headed O’Hara Wright out for dinner and he called himself an ‘interdimensional shaman’.

Former friends were worried about his unusual behaviour. One said they’d last seen him ‘walking through bushes’ in 2018.

Psychiatrists instructed by both the prosecution and the defence agreed that these were the early symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, the disease with which he was diagnosed after he killed his mum.

He was probably suffering from the second, ‘active’, phase of the disease in the months leading up to the killing, Dr Kennedy said.

A month before the walk in Christmas Common he had heard a voice telling him to hit his mother with a rock while they were out walking in woodland. He resisted the urge, but described hearing other internal voices urging him to kill his family and himself.

“He certainly deteriorated very dramatically on the day of the offence,” Dr Kennedy told the jury.

Later, after he spent two weeks on a hospital ward being treated for his physical injuries, he was deemed so mentally unwell he bypassed the normal admission procedures at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. Since his admission, he was reported to have likened himself to Jesus, said he had special knowledge that could help the NHS, and claimed a nurse’s tattoos had secret messages for him.

Dr Kennedy said he had no doubt O’Hara Wright was mentally unwell, describing him as ‘one of the most psychotic people I’ve seen in 30 years’.

Another walker took this picture of Watlington Woods on the day of the murder Picture: CPS

The walk in the woods

O’Hara Wright woke late on October 23, 2020; between 10am and 11am. A heavy cannabis user, he smoked a small amount of the drug through a ‘hollowed out potato’.

His mother and he set off from their Uxbridge home at around 1.40pm, reaching Christmas Common around an hour later. He ‘had a weird energy’ on the drive down, he said.

They began their walk at Watlington Hill, a National Trust beauty spot near Christmas Common. Reaching a fork in the path, O’Hara Wright’s perception of his mother changed.

Her hair turned from grey to red and her eyes changed. She was, he told police officers and doctors, no longer his mum but a demon who he was convinced would lure him off the path and harm him.

His frenzied attack involved striking her with sticks and a broken glass kombucha bottle, biting her wrist, stamping on her and removing her eyes ‘so the demon could not see him’.

The level of violence used to inflict the injuries was ‘exceptional’, pathologist Dr Brett Lockyer told the jury.

She had 93 separate areas of injury but the cause of death was thought to be obstruction of her upper airway by one of her eyeballs, placed there by Daniel while she was still alive but likely unconscious.

A passer by saw a man crouching over a woman in the leaves. At the time, she thought it a courting couple and walked on with her friend. She remembered the man’s eyes as ‘horrible red circles’.

What happened next was pieced together from O’Hara Wright’s account to the doctors and careful detective work.

He described running to a pond, from which he drank. His Lambretta camouflage jacket was later found partially submerged in a water-filled hollow, with a shard of glass and his mother’s second eyeball in the pocket.

At 3.19pm, Louise Townsend was driving past Watlington Park on her way home from work. As she passed the gates to Middle Lodge she noticed something out the corner of her eye.

“Next thing I knew he was on my car bonnet,” she told the jury. The front of her car and the Ford’s windscreen were damaged in the crash. “He sat in the passenger seat and said ‘I’ve fallen from the sky’.”

He calmly asked her to drive on then, after a tussle over her handbag, ran off past another woman who refused to drive him in her car.

Between 3.30pm and 3.40pm, Deborah Fletcher heard a rustling in the bracken outside her home near Christmas Common. The next day, she discovered one of her chickens was missing. O’Hara Wright would tell psychiatrists he had bitten the head off a chicken. The bird was never found.

He ‘climbed onto high voltage’, he said to one of the police officers guarding him at John Radcliffe Hospital a week later. When he was found by police, he had severe burns to his arm and genitals. A pathologist suggested the electric current had entered his body through his arm and left through his genitals.

By around 6pm, police officers sent to the scene after the driver of the Ford that struck O’Hara Wright called 999 came across Mrs Wright’s body.

Other officers followed a trail of blood and discovered Daniel badly-injured in the bathroom of an elderly couple’s detached farmhouse. He’d used a kitchen knife to harm himself before throwing it onto a roof outside the bathroom window and ‘meditating’ for a couple of hours.

He was arrested on suspicion of murder, replying: “That’s fine, I understand.” He added: “It was kill or be killed.”

The smashed Ford Kuga windscreen Picture: CPS

Daniel O’Hara Wright’s camouflage jacket found in a pond Picture: CPS

Stabbed with a spoon

O’Hara Wright’s injuries could have killed him. He was rushed to the John Radcliffe Hospital, where his electrocuted arm was amputated.

His behaviour on the intensive care ward was erratic. He suggested the staff were ‘aliens’ and claimed they ‘wanted to steal his blood’. He would offer himself as a sacrifice to the ‘Queen of England’, he said, and also claimed he ‘created this reality when I was really high’.

In the early hours of November 1, he told nurses he wanted to eat meat. He made comments about killing his mother then, later that morning, told police he’d ‘never said that’. He also said he was a ‘crazy lady, baby’ and was going to do a backflip.

His mood would change quickly, in one breath shouting in an unintelligible language and the next meekly speaking to nurses.

On the afternoon of November 1, he smeared himself in his own faeces and spat it at one of the police officers guarding him.

The following day, he was laughing as he used a spoon handle to stab staff nurse Sergio Juarez in the neck. “I’ll never forget his face as he did so and can only describe it as the face of the devil,” the victim said.

Insanity defence

There was no doubt that O’Hara Wright killed his mother. And there was no doubt in the minds of the psychiatrists and the barristers that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

The only question was whether he was not guilty of murder by reason of insanity – a defence set out in statute a century-and-a-half ago – or guilty of a lesser charge of manslaughter by diminished responsibility.

As prosecutor Alan Blake explained to the jury when he opened the case last Monday, it was not for the judge, the lawyers or the doctors to decide whether someone was insane – it was up to them.

“If you do find that he did kill Carole but was probably insane at the time then the correct verdict is one of not guilty by reason of insanity,” he said.

“That decision is not one for doctors. It is not one for lawyers. It is one for you, informed and assisted by the experts who will give evidence before you.”

Both psychiatrists who gave evidence last week agreed that O’Hara Wright was - legally – insane.

Dr Kennedy said: “I have seen a lot of homicides, I have seen a lot of psychotic homicides. I have seen cases that border on insane, I have seen some cases where I have no doubt it was insanity and this falls into the [second] category.”

“He hits all the markers in terms of the insanity defence,” prosecution expert Dr Cumming added.

Summarising the law, Judge Ian Pringle QC said that in order to find the defendant not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, the jury had to be satisfied it was more likely than not that when he killed his mother he ‘did not know the nature and quality of the acts he was carrying out or if he did so he did not know what he was doing was against the law’.

They were told to ask themselves, first: “Are we satisfied that it is more likely than not that when Daniel killed Carole Wright he did not know the nature and quality of his acts?”

If the answer was yes, they should find him not guilty by reason of insanity. If no, they should ask if they were satisfied that Daniel did not know that what he was doing was illegal.

The jury returned to courtroom one two-and-a-half hours after they began their deliberations. The forewoman’s voice did not waver as she answered the clerk’s question: “Not guilty, by reason of insanity.”

O’Hara Wright, of Regent Avenue, Uxbridge, will appear at court on December 21, when Judge Pringle will decide on the best disposal of the case. It is expected he will remain at Broadmoor.