A man has been determined by a jury to have carried out the killing of a nine-year-old girl by stabbing her in the heart in broad daylight as she played in the street. Lilia Valutyte suffered a single stab wound to the chest as she was playing with a hula hoop in Boston, Lincolnshire on the afternoon of July 28 last year.
Deividas Skebas was unanimously determined to have physically committed the act of killing Lilia by a jury, after around just 15 minutes of deliberation following a two-day trial of the facts at Lincoln Crown Court. The 23-year-old had been deemed unfit to plead or face a conventional trial due to his mental health earlier this year, and did not attend the hearing or play any part in proceedings.
The jury could not deliver a verdict of guilty or not guilty of murder, due to a trial of the facts not deciding whether Skebas intended to kill, but instead had to make a determination as to whether he physically committed the act of killing. Mrs Justice McGowan DBE is expected to sentence Skebas to a hospital order, the only sentence the court can pass, later on Tuesday.
A trial of facts – also known as a finding of fact, trial of the act, or trial of the issue – is not to decide whether someone intended to commit an act or question a defendant’s state of mind but to determine whether they physically did it.
While a defendant cannot be criminally convicted, the burden of proof for a jury remains beyond all reasonable doubt.
On the second day of proceedings on Tuesday, the Crown’s KC, Christopher Donnellan, read the court a transcript of Skebas’s interview with police following his arrest.
In the interview, Skebas admitted: “I grabbed the knife and I stabbed her.” The court previously saw CCTV of a man alleged to be Skebas pacing around Boston town centre on the evening of July 28 last year, having been seen buying a paring knife in the town’s Wilko store two days earlier.
At around 6.15pm, the man was seen running towards Lilia, who was playing with a hula-hoop outside a shop where her mother worked in Fountain Lane.
He stabbed her once and ran away, with Lilia dying at 7.11pm after the blade pierced her heart. The knife was later recovered “tucked behind a radiator” when police searched Skebas’s property in Thorold Street, Boston, two days later.
A blood-stained grey Calvin Klein T-shirt was also found, with DNA from the blood matching that of Lilia.
