Model whose ‘booty messages’ lured ex to be tortured to death with diamante riding crop is jailed for life
A MODEL who was used as bait in a honey trap to lure a man to his death was today jailed for life.
Coral Edgar, 26, sent Snapchat “booty messages” to Lee McKnight encouraging him to come over to her house for sex.
But when he got there 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 former teen model Edgar 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 – were convicted of murder and were all jailed for life at Carlisle crown court.
Lee, 26, had been in a brief relationship with Edgar and she used that background to lure him to the house “on a promise of sex”, the court heard.
Prosecutor Tim Cray QC said: “To use slang - these were booty messages, Lee believing perhaps he was on a promise of sex if he turned up at Coral’s.”
Lee was attacked because he owed money to a drug gang, it was said.
After searching a number of addresses in vain looking for him, Davison persuaded Edgar to entice him to her house on July 24 last year.
Edgar claimed she played no part in the plan or 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 up blood in the kitchen.
Lee’s mum Wendy said in a victim impact statement: “Whatever Lee may have done, nobody deserves to go in such a vile, violent and tragic manner.
“It continually goes through our minds about his last steps into that awful house… the trap and the violence he was about to experience in that torture chamber.”
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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 - denied murder but were all convicted earlier this month.
Mr Justice Hilliard told Edgar: “Lee McKnight had done nothing to deserve the deception you used upon him, getting him around to your house when you knew what was in store for him.”
All defendants were given life sentences with minimum terms - Davison for 30 years; Graham, 26 years; Jamie Lee Roberts, 16-and-a-half years’ detention; Coral Edgar, 13-and-a-half years; Carol Edgar, 13 years and Paul Roberts, 20-and-a-half years.
