A university student lay in wait for his housemate to return home before stabbing him 30 times to death in a “carefully planned and cold-blooded execution”, a court heard. Zack Coughlan dressed all in black and wore a mask and gloves to ambush Jamie Collins, from Swansea, in the garden of their home in Filton, South Gloucestershire.
Bristol Crown Court heard Mr Collins, 21, was stabbed repeatedly and Coughlan, 23, left him dying in the alleyway as he cycled away on his housemate’s bike. The student was attacked shortly before 6pm on April 8 this year after returning from UWE Bristol where he was studying robotics alongside his killer.
Attack and aftermath
Coughlan then dumped the bike at a nearby retail park, bought a change of clothes and threw his bloodstained clothing in a pond. He then returned home to the house they shared in Cleve Road at about 9pm, put a pizza in the oven and did some online gaming with friends.
Adam Vaitilingam KC, prosecuting, told the jury: “A few hours later he decided it was time to call the police and pretend that he had just found his friend’s body in the garden. At about 2am – eight hours later – the defendant called 999. He said that his friend had been stabbed. They told him to do CPR until paramedics arrived and he told them that he was.”
Shortly afterwards armed police officers arrived. They saw Jamie’s body in the back garden of the house. They spoke to the defendant. He told them that he had been out, at the park, and he had just come home. He had noticed that the back gate was open so came outside and it was then that he found Jamie lying in the garden.
Evidence against Coughlan
The court heard the attack was caught on CCTV installed at the house they shared, which Coughlan showed officers who initially treated him as a witness. Mr Vaitilingam told jurors it was the prosecution case that the masked attacker was Coughlan.
He said the defendant’s blood had been found on Mr Collins’ bike, and analysis of his mobile phone matched the killer’s movements afterwards captured on CCTV. “The investigation showed clear evidence that it was Zack who had been the man who had waited for Jamie and then stabbed him to death before cycling away,” he said. “And so Zack went from being a witness to a suspect in the murder. He was arrested and interviewed by the police.”
Coughlan had injuries to his hands, and he told people who saw him bleeding that he had been climbing trees and had fallen and hurt himself. The jury was told that Coughlan and Mr Collins were both final year students at UWE Bristol and lived together in a house owned by the defendant.
Prosecution case and plea
Mr Vaitilingam said there had previously been disagreements between the pair about paying rent and whether Coughlan was charging too much, but they had been resolved. “There was nothing that any of the friends were aware of that seemed to be a significant problem,” he said. “They hung out together both in person and online, they did gaming together, they went out together, entirely normal student life.”
The court heard that Coughlan now accepts he had killed Mr Collins, and had admitted his manslaughter. “We understand that he will say that he had lost control of himself because of things that Jamie had said to him over the previous days and weeks that made him fear for his life,” Mr Vaitilingam said. “And so, because of his fear of Jamie, he had been unable to stop himself from killing him.”
The prosecutor said the crown’s case was this defence “doesn’t even get past first base”. “Because this was not a killing done by someone losing their self-control,” he said. “This was a carefully planned and cold-blooded execution. Someone who has lost control doesn’t plan ahead in the way that he did, dressing up so as to avoid being identified and then waiting for 20 minutes outside an address for their victim to appear. Far from being out of control, Zack was very much in control of what he did, and you will see that as we show you his movements in the hours and minutes before he killed Jamie. His actions afterwards, disposing of his clothes, pretending he had been climbing trees so as to explain knife cuts to his hands, coming home and playing online games with his friends, looking at the CCTV app on his phone, trying to deceive the police when he called them at 2am. Those were further acts of someone very much in control.”
Coughlan, of Cleve Road, Filton, South Gloucestershire, denies murder. The trial continues.
