A father has been found guilty of murdering his 14-year-old daughter after an alleged playfight in their Darlington kitchen left her with an 11cm stab wound to her heart.
Simon Vickers, 50, claimed he had accidentally picked up a knife along with a pair of tongs during the scuffle, which had seen his daughter Scarlett playfully throw grapes at him on 5 July last year.
He had denied both murder and manslaughter but has been convicted following a trial at Teesside Crown Court after the jury deliberated for 13 hours and 21 minutes.
Vickers had told police who arrived at the scene that they had been playing one minute and the next blood was “gushing” from her chest.
Despite his claims that this had been an accident, the prosecution argued that the suggestion he threw the knife at her was “practically impossible” and the wound was too deep to have been caused accidentally.
Home Office pathologist Dr Jennifer Bolton explained to the jury that the way the knife went into Scarlett’s chest meant it must have been held in a hand, with force.
His partner and Scarlett’s mother Sarah Hall and other family members looked stunned in the public gallery when the verdict was returned, while Vickers did not visibly react in the dock.
Ms Hall has stood by her partner of 27 years, telling jurors that Vickers loved their only child and would never harm her.
Defence barrister Nicholas Lumley KC said Scarlett was the much-loved only child of her parents and that Vickers “had no desire to harm her in any way at all”.
Mr Lumley said: “They had been messing around together in the kitchen, in a normal playful way and Simon Vickers suddenly realised that Scarlett had been injured.
“Her body must have come into contact with a sharp knife and she quickly died as a result of a single knife wound.
“He, Simon Vickers, will bear moral responsibility for his daughter’s death for the rest of his life.
Ms Hall was present in the kitchen and tried to save the teenager as she bled to death on the floor, jurors heard.
She made a 999 call and told the operator they had been “messing about” and that her partner had thrown something at their daughter “and he didn’t realise”.
After he was arrested, Vickers said at the police station: “We were just playing in the kitchen, I don’t know how this happened, one minute I was cooking, next there’s blood gushing out of her chest.”
Asked in a police interview if he was responsible for his daughter’s death, Mr McKone said Vickers replied: “I must be.”
Her mother,who had been cooking spaghetti bolognese in the kitchen with them that night, was emotional in the witness box at times as she gave evidence in support of her partner.
She said: “We had a very happy family life, we all loved each other very much, we lived in a little bubble.
“Simon treated Scarlett very well, he was a very hands-on dad, he loved her very much.”
Prior to the incident, Vickers had been drinking wine, watching the Euros football tournament on television and had smoked cannabis that day.
During their inquiries, police examined the family’s phones and found no evidence of ill treatment, and jurors were told that Scarlett’s school had no concerns about her home life and there was no social services involvement.
Before the jury was sent out to consider their verdicts, the prosecutor Mark McKone KC said: “If you accept that Mr Vickers has lied about how Scarlett was killed, this must be because he has something important to cover up.
“This suggests that he does not have a truthful account which he considers to be innocent for you to even consider.
“In other words, Mr Vickers has not got an innocent explanation for wounding Scarlett when the knife was held in Mr. Vickers’ hand.”
A post-mortem examination found that the kitchen knife breached the chest wall between the fifth and sixth ribs, went through her lower lung and passed into the left ventricle of the heart.
Scarlett died very quickly from blood loss, the pathologist found.
