HONEYTRAP MURDER: A MODEL is facing life for murder after she was used as bait in a honey trap to lure a man to his death.
Lee McKnight, 26, owed money to an associate who persuaded Coral Edgar, 26, to send him Snapchat “booty messages” encouraging him to come over to her house for sex.
When he arrived at 2am he was subjected to a horrific two-hour ordeal by Jamie Davison, 26, and two other men.
They tied him to a chair and punched and kicked him before whipping him repeatedly with a diamante-handled riding crop which Edgar’s mother had bought from a sex shop.
The men then wrapped Premier Inn worker Lee’s near lifeless body in a carpet and drove him to a river in Edgar’s mother’s Nissan Navarra– while the former teen model cleaned up the mess at her home.
They dumped him in the river where a farmer found Lee’s body a few hours later.
Four men and two women – Edgar and her mother – have now been found guilty of Lee’s murder.
Lee had been in a brief relationship with Edgar and she used that background to lure him to the house “on a promise of sex”, Carlisle Crown Court heard.
Prosecutor Tim Cray QC said: “Almost certainly this was a ruse – to use slang – these were booty messages, Lee believing perhaps he was on a promise of sex if he turned up at Coral’s.
“That’s why we say she is the ruse, because what’s the alternative? By the time he travelled, the scene had been set for the attack.”
Lee was a “marked man” and had gone to ground because he owed so much money to drug dealer Davison, it was said.
Davison was desperate to recover the cash because he was also in debt to people further up the chain, the jury heard.
After searching a number of addresses in vain looking for Lee, Davison persuaded Edgar to entice him to her house on July 24 last year.
Edgar claimed she played no part in the plan of the savage beating and insisted: “I’ve just stayed in the living room, covering my ears and shutting my eyes.”
But she did admit that following the assault – in which Lee suffered 36 blunt force trauma wounds to the head, a depressed skull fracture, brain bleed and broken neck bone – she “cleaned the kitchen.”
A pathologist concluded Lee suffered a “very, very severe beating”, and was still alive when he was dumped in the River Caldew.
The three attackers – Davison, 26, Arron Graham, 26, and Jamie Roberts, 18 – Edgar and her 47-year-old mother Carol and Roberts’ dad Paul, 51, who threw away a phone and burned clothes, all of Carlisle, Cumbria – all denied murder but were all convicted.
They were remanded in custody and will be sentenced later
