Man jailed for life on murder and rape charge

A MAN who raped and murdered a Belfast mother-of-one was yesterday told he must serve at least 22 years of a life sentence before…

A MAN who raped and murdered a Belfast mother-of-one was yesterday told he must serve at least 22 years of a life sentence before even being considered for release.

Jailing Kristoff Emmanuel Alauya (25) from Nigeria at Belfast Crown Court, Mr Justice Weir told him he could find no evidence of remorse or contrition on his part for the gruesome killing.

The judge said he found it “impossible to comprehend” the fact that after raping and killing the defenceless Ms Moore, he ransacked her home and put various personal items into bags to take with him.

“No one who has seen the police photographs could be anything but appalled at the callous manner in which her body had been left spreadeagled, lying on the kitchen floor,” said Mr Justice Weir.

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He told the court that anyone, even experienced police officers, going into the kitchen and finding her body would have been devastated, but added that the grim discovery had been made by Ms Moore’s teenage daughter who “ran screaming” from the flat to her grandparents’ nearby home and so began what he described as a “commendable and careful police investigation”.

Following two days of evidence at his trial last November, Alauya, with an address at Churchfield in Carlow, pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of 38-year-old Grace Moore on November 18th, 2006 and to stealing a number of personal possessions and documents from her Erris Grove flat.

The jury had heard that Alauya had come up to Belfast a couple of days before he met Ms Moore at Skye nightclub and had gone back with her to the flat.

After leaving Ms Moore for dead, Alauya ransacked her home, stealing various personal items including perfume, jewellery, personal documents, a DVD player, cheque books and a switch card.

The jury also heard that crime scene investigators uncovered Alauya’s bloody fingerprint on a wall and that the postmortem examination revealed his semen both inside and underneath Ms Moore’s body.

That examination also revealed that one of two stab wounds had partially severed the carotid artery as it traversed the whole width of her neck and had caused massive bleeding which led to her rapid death. Along with the wounds there were bruises to Ms Moore’s neck, indicating that she had been strangled.

Walking away from the bloody scene, the killer flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to stop at Creighton’s garage where he bought microwave burgers because he was hungry.

Alauya was arrested the next day at Skye nightclub and subsequently the police uncovered Ms Moore’s belongings, along with a T-shirt stained with her blood, in a flat at University Avenue.

Mr Justice Weir said Alauya had tried to claim asylum after arriving in Dublin and that whilst there, had married an Irish woman, become addicted to crack cocaine, fathered four children by four different women, and had attacked and robbed two taxi drivers at gunpoint on two consecutive days in May 2005.

He has pleaded guilty to those charges, but has not yet been sentenced as he fled to Belfast.

Mr Justice Weir said he considered the obvious “sexual maltreatment” of Ms Moore brought the case into a higher starting bracket and added that he found the “cold-blooded ransacking” of his victim’s home and the theft of her belongings to be an aggravating factor.

In relation to mitigating features, Mr Justice Weir said that while Alauya had pleaded guilty, the pleas had come in a “piecemeal fashion”, and so he was only giving him “minimal credit” for them.

He added that it appeared Alauya felt more sorry for himself than he did for his victim and her family.

As well as the 22-year minimum life term, Mr Justice Weir imposed a 10-year term for Ms Moore’s rape and two years for theft to be served concurrently and ordered that Alauya sign the police sex offenders’ register for the rest of his life.

The officer in charge of the case, Det Chief Insp David Cunningham, said that in nearly 20 years as an officer, “this case is by far the most distressing”.