A convicted murderer who battered his 83-year-old father while forcing him to sign a makeshift will has been jailed for five years.
Ian Griffin, 57, brutally attacked Bernard Griffin at the family home in Winwick, Warrington, after spending the afternoon in the Swan pub on May 1 last year. He punched and kicked him for around 30 minutes, leaving him with a broken nose, bruising and swelling all over his body. He also knocked out his gold tooth.
Griffin previously served 22 months behind bars for murdering his fiancée in a Paris hotel room in 2009 before being released from prison.
Sentencing at Liverpool Crown Court
At Liverpool Crown Court on Monday, Griffin, of Adlington Road, Wilmslow, was jailed for five years and given a further year on extended licence after previously admitting inflicting grievous bodily harm and threatening to destroy property. He was also handed restraining orders banning him from contacting his father and his parents' neighbours indefinitely, the Liverpool Echo reports.
Griffin appeared by videolink from HMP Liverpool without legal representation. He told a judge that his medication had made him "go funny" and said: "It was a one in a million. It will never happen again. I've been a great son, I really have."
Attack details
The court heard Griffin had been staying in the summerhouse of his parents' home in Delph Lane when neighbours heard him "screaming and shouting in the back garden" at around 5pm on April 30 last year. His 80-year-old mother, Janet, was overheard telling him: "Stop, the neighbours will call the police."
Andrew Scott, prosecuting, said Griffin then turned his attention towards the couple who lived next door. One of the neighbours was carrying out work on his home using scaffolding when Griffin threatened to fight him and said he would burn the property down.
The following day, after an argument about money, Griffin's brother Adrian called the police because he was concerned for his parents' welfare. Officers attended the scene and found Bernard "bleeding heavily" on a sofa in the living room and saying: "Help me, help me."
Griffin was arrested nearby with blood on his hands. The living room was left in disarray, with a coffee table overturned and a lamp smashed and hanging from the wall.
Bernard Griffin told police his son had assaulted him for nearly 30 minutes, punching him in the face several times, pulling him to the floor and repeatedly jumping and stamping on him. He said Griffin had also forced him to write a note "saying that the estate money goes to Janet".
Body-worn camera footage played to the court showed Bernard saying: "He'd have killed me. He's so strong. He's terrible, a different person. He was saying all sorts. Every time he walked past me, he swiped me. I was on the floor. I thought that was it. His knee went into my stomach. I feel like I've been in a fight. I'm glad to see you, I'll tell you."
Police later discovered that Griffin had used his mother's mobile phone to record part of the "gratuitous and degrading" assault. The footage showed Bernard Griffin signing a piece of paper as Griffin shouted: "You give her 50 per cent of what she owns now."
Bernard Griffin was taken to Warrington Hospital with a broken nose, a knocked-out tooth and extensive bruising. He was discharged the following day.
Previous murder conviction
Griffin claimed it was "ridiculous" that he had been accused of assaulting his dad because he was his parents' carer. He also claimed that he had made his father write the note as his "father had been seeing other women".
Griffin has eight previous convictions for 13 offences, including the murder of his millionaire fiancée Kinga Legg at the five-star Bristol Hotel in Paris in 2009.
Mr Scott said of this: "The defendant inflicted 100 blows to the deceased's head, face and body in what was described as a frenzied attack. The suite in the hotel where they were staying at the time was heavily bloodstained. The deceased was found naked in a bath inside the suite. The bath was three quarters full. The defendant attempted to clean the suite unsuccessfully before fleeing the jurisdiction to Cheshire, being located sleeping rough in woodland in Warrington before he was extradited to Paris."
Griffin was initially jailed for 20 years in December 2014 before the sentence was reduced to 14 years on appeal in April 2016. However, he subsequently appealed his prison term on medical grounds and was granted parole in October 2016 after serving only 22 months.
Judge's sentencing remarks
Sentencing, Judge Swinnerton said: "[Bernard Griffin] describes you banging at the door, shouting and screaming and making a roaring noise then charging at him. You repeatedly punched and kicked him for around half an hour before police arrived. You left him very bruised, very bloodied, very battered. There is a long list of bruising to his body, to his limbs and a fracture of his nose. He also lost a tooth. He had dentures, and they had to be replaced. His jaw alignment changed as a result of the assault.
"I have no doubt whatsoever that your father was a particularly vulnerable victim. He was 83 years of age. He had been in a car accident which left him with a brain injury. He also had a colostomy bag. You hit him in various places, including the stomach and bladder. You inflicted on that very vulnerable man grave injuries."
The judge added: "I have considered carefully the pre-sentence report, in which the author of that report talks about the escalating pattern of violent offending in a domestic setting, the ongoing persistent denial, minimisation and lack of victim empathy, and comes to the conclusion that you are a very high risk of serious harm to your father. That is a conclusion with which I agree entirely.
"I have also considered your previous record of convictions, including that murder, where there were around 100 separate injuries or blows to your then fiancée. I have considered that in the context of 30 to 60 minutes of punching, kicking and stamping on your elderly father."
