Delivery driver ‘murdered women in escalating campaign of violence’

A delivery driver killed and mutilated a sex worker in the midst of an “escalating” campaign of violence and sexual offending that culminated in the murder of a second woman, a court has heard.

David Smith, 66, is on trial for the murder of Sarah Crump, 33, who was found dead at her one-bedroom flat in Southall, west London on August 29, 1991.

Jurors at Inner London crown court heard Smith developed “fascinations and obsessions” with some of the women he paid for sex, and he has a history of violent offending.

In 1999 - eight years after he is accused of murdering Ms Crump - Smith killed 21-year-old Amanda Walker, another sex worker.

Prosecutor William Boyce KC said the killings had similarities as “both women were mutilated after death”.

Smith raped a young mother at knifepoint in her own home in 1976 and tried to rape an escort just 10 days before Ms Crump’s murder, in what Mr Boyce described as “an escalating pattern of violent and sexual offending” stretching back to his teenage years in the 1970s.

The court heard Ms Crump was a secretary in the chiropody department in Wimbledon Hospital, south-west London and had a previous career as a psychiatric nurse, but she also worked “from time to time” as an escort.

Smith, who lived with his parents in Hampton, Middlesex, and made local deliveries for a firm in Heathrow, regularly used sex workers with the “intensity” becoming more frequent in the period leading up to Ms Crump’s murder, the court heard.

“He was someone who developed fascinations and obsessions with some of the women he met in this way,” said Mr Boyce.

“The prosecution alleges that David Smith murdered Sarah Crump and he had visited her flat on August 28 to use her services as an escort girl.

“He used a false name, ‘Duncan’.

“He was the last person known to be inside Ms Crump’s flat before she was discovered to be dead.

“He was there as a paying visitor. For such a visitor, she would have taken off her clothes and lain on the bed where she was found.”

The court heard Ms Crump’s naked body was found “brutally mutilated” with the incisions similar to the surgical scars of a woman Smith had “become obsessed with” and “rejected his attentions”.

“The motivation was clearly, you may infer, sexual and violent,” said Mr Boyce.

Details of Smith’s offending have been put before the jury, including the 1976 knifepoint rape, an attempted rape of an escort on August 18 1991, and Ms Walker’s murder where her body suffered “substantial mutilation” after death.

“The murder of Ms Crump was one part in a timeline of escalating violent and sexual offending against women by the defendant, which stretched from his teenage years in the mid-1970s, until his commission of the murder of another sex worker in 1999”, said Mr Boyce.

“The prosecution say that the evidence of that offending is highly probative of the prosecution’s case that it was this defendant, and no-one else, who was responsible for the murder of Sarah Crump.”

Smith denies a single charge of murder and the trial continues.