A man strangled a teacher he met on an online dating site before sexually assaulting and taking pictures of her dead body, a court has heard.
Katie Locke, 23, was killed by Carl Langdell while the pair were on their first date at Theobalds Park Hotel, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire on Christmas Eve last year.
Her body was later found in a bush near a skip in the hotel’s grounds.
The day after killing Ms Locke, Langdell reportedly confessed his actions over the phone to his mother, describing himself as a "monster".
Langdell, 26, pleaded guilty to Ms Locke’s murder at a hearing in March.
At a two day sentencing hearing at St Albans Crown Court, Ann Evans, prosecuting, said after Langdell had killed Ms Locke “he decided to have sexual intercourse with her dead body after which he took photographs of her body on his iPhone.”
Langdell and Ms Locke, from Buckhurst Hill, Essex, met on the online dating site Plenty of Fish. Before arriving at the hotel they had previously been drinking at a bar in Shoreditch, east London, the Telegraph reports.
Before they met, Langdell told Ms Locke he had his own law firm, but had actually spent the last two years suffering from mental illness, which included “marked periods in psychiatric hospitals”.
“The tragedy of this case is that Katie Locke, like thousands of other young people, having agreed to a date with Carl Langdell, accepted what he told her about himself,” said Ms Evans.
"At the end of their first date in the early hours of 24 December last year, she agreed to go back to a hotel with him, he strangled her in that hotel room and then dumped her body near a skip outside the hotel."
The court heard Langdell had previously told a psychiatric nurse about his violent sexual fantasies.
In a family statement, Ms Locke, who according to the Hertfordshire Mercury was a history and politics teacher at Cardinal Pole School in Hackney, east London, was described as not having “a bad bone in her body”.
The statement said: “Katie worked hard and loved her job as a teacher. In what little spare time she had she enjoyed sports. We now feel like our future has been stolen from us.”
Langdell had been detained under the Mental Health Act and given a suspended sentence for making threats to kill in March last year.
His sentencing will continue on Friday.
