Smith’s excuse for torturing Kelly was that she’d provoked him into doing so, daring him to do it. Smith continued to deny murder, but did admit to abusing Kelly, claiming she often inflicted injuries upon herself to make the abuse look worse. ![]() Kelly was eventually put out of her misery, beaten unconscious with a shower head and then drowned in the bath tub. ![]() The extensive stab wounds found on Kelly’s body included stab wounds to her empty eye sockets and the inside of her mouth. Perhaps the most gruesome and disturbing aspect of this case is the fact that Kelly’s eyes had been gouged out somewhere between 5 days and 3 weeks prior to her death. Her arms, hands, legs, and kneecaps had been crushed, rendering her unable to walk. The horrific injuries inflicted on Kelly included burns on her thighs from a hot iron, partial scalping, scalding to her thighs and buttocks, and the mutilation of her ears, face and genitals. She had been starved and denied water in the days leading up to her death. In the last month of her life, Kelly had been kept locked in the house, tied by her hair to the radiator or restrained by a ligature around her neck. Her blood was found in every single room in the house and over 150 separate injuries on her body were identified during a post-mortem examination. Kelly was found in a bedroom, naked and horrifically mutilated. Upon arrival at the home, it soon became evident that this story was fabricated and that Kelly’s death was anything but accidental. ![]() On April 16, 1996, Smith entered a local police station, spinning a story about an argument in the bath tub which had resulted in his girlfriend accidentally drowning. Kelly became increasingly withdrawn, until contact was eventually cut off, save for a few cards, which were suspiciously not written in Kelly’s handwriting. Most worryingly, Kelly often bore bruises and bite marks, which she dismissed as accidental. When Kelly visited home, her parents noticed that she appeared to have lost weight and looked unclean. In 1993, 16-year-old Kelly Anne Bates left school and moved in with her boyfriend of two years, introducing him to her parents as 32-year-old “Dave Smith.” What they didn’t know was that his real name was James Patterson Smith, a 48-year-old man with a lengthy history of domestic violence.
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