Man beat up his girlfriend at Premier Inn hotel near Oxford

Luke Turrell, 30, who had the woman’s name tattooed over his wrist, pleaded guilty a day into his trial to causing her actual bodily harm during the attack in their Premier Inn hotel room in Kidlington on New Year’s Eve.

He claimed in a basis of plea, which was not accepted by the Crown Prosecution Service, that he lashed out after she threw a glass at him – striking him in the face.

The victim was herself a reluctant witness, having filed a statement in July withdrawing her support for the prosecution. She initially failed to answer a summons requiring her to be at court on Monday, but attended the following day after a police officer collected her from London.

Footage from the bodyworn cameras of police officers called first to the petrol station forecourt from which she initially called 999 and later at the John Radcliffe Hospital, showed the victim covered in blood and with a heavily-swollen face.

She told the officers that Turrell had been ‘pinning my arm behind my back’ and punching her in the face. “Punching, punching, punching me,” she repeated.

The medical evidence confirmed that her nose had been broken. She also suffered significant bruising.

The woman was subjected to cross-examination before her former partner changed his plea on Wednesday (August 23).

Richard Davies, defending, put it to her that she suffered the injuries when she ‘fell over’. She disagreed.

She was read a line from her withdrawal statement, in which she said her first statement was ‘incorrect and untrue’.

“That is the crux of this case; what you said on January 1 [in the statement] just wasn’t true, was it?” Turrell’s barrister put to her.

The victim replied: “Yes, it was true.”

Sentencing Turrell on Wednesday, judge Recorder John Bate-Williams challenged any suggestion of the defendant acting in self-defence, describing his actions as ‘grotesquely over the top’ and a ‘violent and cowardly attack’.

If ‘every picture tells a story’, he added, the photographs of the victim told a tale of a ‘very nasty beating’.

“You can’t have learned the basic rule which most of us learned in the primary [school] playground, which is that you never, ever hit a woman,” the judge said.

Turrell, of Bear Close, Woodstock, was jailed for two years in total. He was also disqualified from driving for three months, having earlier admitted driving his then partner’s car in breach of a roads ban imposed in September 2022 for dangerous driving.

A restraining order prevents him from contacting the victim until further notice.

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