Subject: Church Worker Jailed for Life After Axe Murder
Fri, 25 Feb 2000 00:38:47 GMT

http://dailynews.netscape.com/news/OddlyEnough/02_24_2000.reodd-story-bcoddaxe.html

Church Worker Jailed for Life After Axe Murder

LONDON (Reuters) - A British church worker who decapitated his son's former lover with an axe was found guilty of murder Thursday and jailed for life by a British court.

Anthony Phillips, a 43-year-old church steward from Wolverhampton in central England, chopped off the head of his next-door neighbor Lorraine Howell after he discovered she had given birth to a baby girl fathered by his son Jamie.

The court heard that Phillips, described as a deeply religious man, thought he was doing God's work in killing Howell, who he claimed had raped Jamie when she was 34 and he was just 15.

Howell's two children were in the house when Phillips attacked her.

"I...took the axe and hit her with it repeatedly, like some kind of frenzy," a police statement read to the court cited Phillips as saying. "There was blood everywhere."

"God does not want people like that on earth and I had to remove that person from the Earth," he said.

Sentencing Philips at Birmingham Crown Court the judge said Phillips had destroyed the lives of his family and those of the victim's family by committing the murder.