A woman who disguised herself with a goatee beard, a wig, heavy framed glasses and a hi-vis jacket before killing her half-sister with a chicken-shaped ceramic pot was today found guilty of murder. Yvonne Caylor, 53, went to a fancy dress shop to make herself look like a man before barging into Nicki Collingbourne’s flat and launching the attack.
Nicki, 26, was found dead in her underwear lying in a pool of blood in Ivel Court, Letchworth, by members of her family the following evening.
CCTV showed Caylor, in the workman’s jacket, walking into the building and knocking at Nicki’s door. When it was opened it is believed she recognised her older sister beneath the disguise. She tried to shut the door, but Caylor forced her way in and carried out the attack.
Caylor, who worked as a welder before suffering a back injury, spent over three hours after the killing clearing up the flat and making her sister’s death appear like suicide.
Luton crown court heard she was due to face trial for burgling Nicki’s flat and perverting the course of justice. The case was due to start some time in the 8 weeks after Monday May 23, the day of the murder.
The charges arose after Nicki had evicted Caylor from her flat on the night of October 3 to 4 last year.
Caylor complained to the police that she had been assaulted and when police questioned Nicki, the prosecution said she burgled the flat. No action was taken against Nicki, but Caylor herself was arrested.
She then urged Nicki’s mother Rena Hibbert-Jones, who has since died, to give a false account of who owned the property she had taken.
Following the killing, Caylor made plans to flee the country. Computer searches revealed she was planning to drive to Spain and then fly to the United States where she had lived with her husband until the summer of 2015.
On the evening of the killing, Caylor had a Facebook conversation with her husband Philip in which she said: “Pray for Nicki, as I will.”
The junior prosecuting barrister Alan Blake told the jury, in his closing speech: “That was disingenuous, distasteful deceit by a the woman who had entered Ivel Court that morning and murdered her sister.”
In the WhatsApp message sent to her niece Jodie Collingbourne, six months earlier, Nicki sent a photo of her door with items piled up on the inside to prevent Caylor getting in. She wrote: “This is how I have to live. But hope it works if she does try to break in.”
Yvonne Caylor, from Grove Road, Hitchin, denied murder on Monday May 23, but was convicted by a jury of 6 women and 5 men.
During at six week trial they heard that there was a substantial age discrepancy between the two women, who shared the same father.
Nicki had travelled to the States in September 2011 and for a while lived with her half sister. It was not successful and she returned to the UK in August 2012. Caylor, who had lived in the US since the early 1990s, returned to the UK in June last year.
On the day after the murder Nicki was supposed to collect her mother from the Lister Hospital. When she could not be contacted, three members of her family obtained a spare key and, on the evening of Tuesday 24 May, two of them went in.
Prosecutor John Price QC said: “They found Nicki Collingbourne. She was very obviously dead. She was lying on the floor of her kitchen.
“It was a horrible and very distressing scene. Nicki was lying on her back. Her feet were facing the door.
“She was wearing only her underwear. There was a large amount of blood on the floor and it had pooled in the region where her head was lying.
“On the floor were a number of shattered or broken pieces of ceramic. They turned out to be the fragments of a ceramic kitchen pot that once it was put together it was in the shape of a chicken.”
Mr Price said the victim must have been struck on the back of the head with the pot. He said it had been picked up, wielded and brought down on her head with two hands.
“The nature of the head injury indicates a degree of force applied in causing it to have rendered her unconscious,” he said.
He said her wrists bore similar, deep incised wounds, which he said were not self-inflicted.
He went on: “A bizarre feature was the fact was in her right hand she was holding by the handle a small hand brush that comes with a dustpan and brush set. That she was found holding the brush is that the scene had been staged in some way, possibly to try and resemble a suicide. If that was the case it was very incompetently done. The brush would have fallen from the hand before she hit the ground.”
“Wounds to her wrist indicated they had been inflicted to her body on shortly before her death. They were not typical of self inflicted wrist wounds. She was unconscious but alive when the blade that caused them was applied.”
After the killing, Caylor cleaned the flat, leaving a knife in a bottle of bleach. However, five blood stains were found on five pieces of the broken ceramic pot. One matched Nicki’s profile, the other four matched Caylor. Her DNA was also found on a hot tap in the bathroom and behind the door to the kitchen.
In the witness box Caylor said she had not been back to the flat since October. She said she had not carried out the burglary and denied she had spoken to Nicki’s mother in an attempt to avoid the burglary charge.
Judge Michael Kay QC will sentence her either this afternoon or tomorrow.
Source: ITV.com
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