What happened
On 15 March 2006, a 39-year-old care worker employed by the agency Carewatch arrived at her client’s flat in Southampton for a routine appointment to help her bathe.
Her client had been killed more than a week earlier. The man in the flat was the client’s fiancé, and he had stabbed her and stayed there with her body. He overpowered her, took £150 with her bank card, and then raped and stabbed her. Both bodies were found the next day. He was arrested in Swanage on 17 March.
The outcome
At Winchester Crown Court, Mr Justice Irwin imposed a whole-life order. He told the man that the brutality and evil of what he did “defies adequate description” and that he must never be released. The man admitted the killings.
An inquest in Southampton was adjourned for five months for further enquiries with social services and Carewatch.
The court heard that he was categorised under the multi-agency public protection arrangements as a low to medium risk offender. He had been convicted in 1995 of two counts of rape and a further serious sexual offence, and had breached the sex offenders’ register three times since.
What went wrong
The detective chief inspector on the case said the man’s actual risk level had never been known until after the killings, when it emerged that he had sexually assaulted former girlfriends who had not reported it.
The police position was that he had been visited in accordance with national standards, and that short of 24-hour surveillance, or locking an offender up for life, there could be no guarantees. That is a fair statement about predicting the conduct of one man. It is not an answer to the question the care agency needed to ask, which was who else was in that household.
What it teaches
The visit was planned around a client and not around a home. Care work delivered in private flats depends on the employer knowing who lives there, and on somebody asking before the rota is written.
A register that offender managers maintain and a care agency never consults does nothing for the worker on the doorstep. Where a household contains someone with a violent or sexual history, that is a fact about the workplace, and the employer is the only party in a position to hold it.
The sources do not record what lone-working instructions Carewatch gave, or whether a second worker was ever sent to that flat. That absence is part of the finding.
Questions for the room
- When you take on a new client, who asks who else lives in the household, and what answer would change the plan?
- If the only warning is the flat you have just walked into, where is the exit, and when do you start moving toward it?
- Which agency owns the flow of risk information between offender managers and care employers?
- What would a care agency have to be told, and by whom, for a visit like this not to happen?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. One archived set of contemporaneous reports was read: court, inquest and police coverage collected in the vault, covering 2006 to 2008. The care worker is not named on this page. The case includes a sexual offence against her, and the rule for this shelf is that a victim of a sexual offence is not named, whatever the public record carries. For the same reason the page states the offences and not the assault.
Our lone working training covers household risk and the lone visit.
Sources
- Vault archive, contemporaneous court, inquest and police reporting, 2006 to 2008 · held as a named-case text file
Reviewed 20 October 2026.