Man accused of hiring hitman to stab stepdad with ’10-inch hunting’ blade in £200k inheritance murder plot

A MAN paid to have his stepdad killed so he could inherit £200,000 tied up in the value of his house, a jury heard.

Flash Day, 45, allegedly arranged for John Sales, 70, to be stabbed when he learned he was the main beneficiary in his will.

Sales was knifed with a ten-inch “Rambo-style hunting” blade but survived.

Day felt resentful that pensioner Sales took ownership of his mother’s house when she died without leaving a will in 2009, Chelmsford crown court heard.

Brian Reece, opening the prosecution case, said: “This was not a random attack by a stranger. This was a carefully planned attack.”

He said Sales’s wallet and the keys to his Jaguar car were left at the scene, while a poem “laced with references to death” and apparently bearing the signature of Day’s dead brother, was placed at the house.

Sales had put his house on the market with a sale value of £240,000 in September 2015 with a view to downsizing and moving nearer to where his “lady friend” who he met in 2012 lived, the court heard.

Day was allegedly worried about losing his link to the inheritance if the house was sold.

Military-obsessed knifeman Ryan Hynes, 21, of Lawford, Essex, admitted attempted murder on the first day of the trial.

Day, of Colchester, friend Scott Moffat, 49, and a teen girl deny conspiracy to commit murder.

The case goes on.