How did Lee Butler die?
That is the question facing jurors in the trial of Lewis Brown, the man accused of murdering the 39-year-old in a Barton park on October 8, 2021.
Prosecutors claim that 20-year-old alleged drug dealer Brown plunged a knife into Mr Butler’s chest over comments the older man had made about the quality of his drugs.
Brown, however, says that Mr Butler was the one who attacked him – pulling out a knife of his own in an attempt to rob him of drugs and cash.
The Crown, represented by barristers Charles Ward-Jackson and Robert Harding, closed the case for the prosecution on Wednesday. The defence case is expected to begin on Tuesday, with Brown presenting his own account to the jury.
The silent killer
Mr Butler was a drug addict, the trial has heard. Brown, say the prosecution, was a drug dealer.
The older man was taking heroin, crack cocaine and also had a prescription for opiate substitute methadone, which he picked up from The Roundway pharmacy, off Headington Roundabout.
Behind the tragedy of Mr Butler’s death lay significant concerns in Oxford’s drug taking community about a spate of deaths from contaminated heroin in late August and September last year.
The thread that linked three drug overdose deaths in the Oxford area was isotonitazine.
The problem was so widespread and of such concern to police nationwide that any overdose linked to isotonitazine had to be reported to the National Crime Agency.
Det Ch Insp Jessica Milne, Thames Valley Police’s officer tasked with overseeing the force’s response to isotonitazine, told jurors of the synthetic drug: "It is a very, very dangerous drug that will kill you.”
The police weren’t the only ones who were concerned.
Colin Sumner, a former resident of Stowford Road, Barton, and one of the bit-players in Brown’s murder trial, texted a slew of people in September 2021 – including Mr Butler.
“Three more people has been found dead in Oxford from the D [dark, slang for heroin], do not get it if you don't know okay,” he wrote.
‘We don’t want any s***’
The prosecution say that this was a murder that concerned one thing: drugs.
Mr Butler, it is alleged, was concerned about the quality of the product Brown’s ‘Bob’ drugs line was selling in Barton.
Friday, October 8, 2021, the day of his death, began unremarkably. He went to The Roundway pharmacy, where he was a regular, to collect his methadone ‘script’.
Later that day, he called friend Donna Osbourne, who lived a few doors down from him in Bayswater Road. The call woke her up.
"[He asked] if I wanted to put our money together to buy drugs and I just said I wasn't up for it and he said okay I'll leave you to sleep,” she told the jury.
Mr Butler called again at around 5pm, she said. They had each got together £10 and agreed to go halves.
Ms Osbourne, who claimed she knew Brown’s line as ‘Rex’, told the jury: "Lee came over to my home. We made a phone call to the Rex number and asked for crack. It was three bits for £20. So, we put our two £10 together and I phoned the number and was told to go to the Bottom Field."
Before the deal, Mr Butler was said to have made a second call to the drugs line confirming they didn't want any heroin and complaining that the quality was 's**t'.
They arrived at the field at the bottom of Bayswater Road and waited by a bench in the park.
Brown walked towards them, she said. "The first thing [Brown] said was 'bruv, it's not the second or third time today you've been cussing man's tings', which means disrespecting the drugs that he was selling,” she told the jury.
"He was quite angry when he said that and said 'man should juck you' [stab you]. To the left hand side of his waist he had a black handle sticking out which he went to pull with his right hand. He went to do it two or three times. I stopped his arm from raising.”
The younger man passed Ms Osbourne a wrap of crack cocaine from his mouth and was handed £20 in return.
Ms Osbourne said: “As we went to walk back on the path, I've seen Lewis pull the knife from his left hand side and swoosh it round with his right hand and push it into Lee's chest."
She later drew in pencil an image of the knife for police.
Asked to refresh her memory from her statement, she said Brown asked Mr Butler 'are you trying to boy man off, bruv' before drawing the knife and stabbing him in the chest.
Brown ran off towards one of the alleyways leading to Stowford Road.
Mr Butler swayed, with Ms Osbourne telling him not to mess about. Initially, he didn’t think he’d been stabbed. That proved wrong and he collapsed to the ground, bleeding heavily.
Frantic, Ms Osbourne called 999 at 5.51pm and asked for the ambulance service. A number of members of the public came to her aid. Among them was Tim Morgan, who tried to perform CPR.
Paramedics arrived at around 6pm. They were unable to save Mr Butler’s life. He was pronounced dead at 6.41pm.
Dr Matthew Lyall, the forensic pathologist who carried out the autopsy, said the single fatal chest wound was 14cm deep. The blade had gone through the ribs, punctured a lung and come to rest in an artery near the heart. He would have died from ‘heavy blood loss’ as a result of the cut to his aorta blood vessel.
After the stabbing
Ms Osbourne returned a missed a call from the ‘Bob’ drugs line number at 6.08pm, around 18 minutes after the stabbing.
“I didn't talk, the person said that wasn't meant to happen and it was nothing to do with me,” she said.
She also claimed to have been phoned by Colin Sumner later in the evening, who told her: “Say it's a black boy, yeah, say it's a black boy." He denied making the comment.
Ms Osbourne admitted telling those who were first on the scene – including one police officer – that she and Lee had ‘just gone out for a walk’ when he was stabbed by an unknown assailant.
She told the jury that she’d not told the truth because, firstly, she didn’t want to tell the member of public about what happened and, later, associates of Brown’s had gathered near the scene of the stabbing. “If looks could kill I’d have dropped dead,” she said.
The eyewitness was walked home by a female police officer. She handed over the plastic wrappings that had come from Brown’s mouth, but removed the crack cocaine inside and took it early the next morning when she got home from the police station.
By foot, bus and taxi
By the time Mr Butler died at 6.41pm, prosecutors say, Brown was long gone.
In the immediate wake of the stabbing he was said to have gone to the flat of Colin Sumner in Stowford Road. Although Mr Sumner told the jury that he had not seen him, Brown allegedly later told a friend he’d gone ‘to Colin’s’.
He walked to Risinghurst Post Office, where he bought cigarette papers and a bottle of Magnum tonic wine.
The 20-year-old then retraced his steps, getting on the number 8 bus through Barton.
CCTV showed him with his hood up, looking out the window as the bus was diverted from its normal route down north down Bayswater Road from Stowford Road – instead turning right towards Headington Roundabout. At times he could be seen speaking into a phone or with a bottle in his hand.
The camera’s microphone also picked up Brown apparently shouting at a man on the pavement on Fettiplace Road: "Scott, Scott. Call me up on the phone. Call me up on the phone ASAP!"
Brown, who briefly alighted the bus on Fettiplace Road before flagging down the same vehicle a short way up the street and getting back on, rode the service to the Oxford Brookes University campus on Headington Hill. He got off the bus at 6.45pm.
Phone data showed a flurry of calls between Tanisha Mapes, allegedly Brown’s girlfriend, his friend Abu Bakkar and the defendant’s mobile.
Mr Bakkar was said to have arranged a Royal Cars cab to pick Brown up from Brookes, taking him to Wood Farm.
After 8pm a new mobile phone sim card – later found in a phone linked to Brown – was activated and began communicating with Ms Mapes and Mr Bakkar.
- Day 1: Jury sworn in
- Day 2: Prosecution opens its case
- Day 3: Addicts on 'Bob' line
- Day 4: Eyewitness gives evidence
- Day 5: Pathologist in the stand
- Day 6: What happened after stabbing?
- Day 7: Drugs expert
- Day 8: Prosecution closes its case with agreed facts
Another cab picked Brown up from Wood Farm after 8.30pm and dropped him off in Hengrove Close, Barton.
That was the street on which Kayleigh Kimber-Johnson lived. A little after 8.30pm she received a knock at the door, she told the jury.
It was Brown. He appeared ‘nervous’ and kept looking out the window, the court heard.
Ms Kimber-Johnson showed him information about the stabbing and Mr Butler’s death. Brown was said to have replied: “Only stabbed him once, how did he die from that?”
She could ‘feel’ Brown’s panic, she told the jury last week.
The mum-of-two added: "I have been in a similar situation to what Lewis was in that night. But my victim didn't die. I totally understood how he felt."
Brown was said to have used her phone to call someone called ‘Kyle’, whose number the defendant didn’t have on his cheap Samsung handset but was a Snapchat contact of Ms Kimber-Johnson’s.
She confessed to hiding the ‘burner’ style phone in a laundry basket in her home. The mobile was later recovered by the police.
Arrest
By midnight, six hours after the alleged murder, police were said to be preparing to arrest Brown.
Sgt Mark Allmond and his colleagues arrived in Hengrove Close at quarter past midnight. A noise at the back of the house led them to a garden. It sounded as if someone was jumping over a fence, he said.
The officers scaled the fences to a nature reserve behind the close, where they were faced with nettles at head height.
Poor weather prevented the helicopter from being sent up, the jury heard, but the officers waited for the arrival of a police dog.
“We could hear some shouting coming from a garden which was very odd at the time. It almost sounded like a party to start with,” Sgt Allmond said.
"I approached the noise, shone my torch and I could see it was the defendant, Mr Brown."
Footage from the officer’s body-worn video camera showed the defendant lying face-down on the ground with the red dot of a Taser on his back.
Brown was arrested at 1.13am on suspicion of murder. He repeatedly asked the officers about the ‘circumstances’ of his arrest.
Found on him was some cash and a lighter. He was interviewed later that day and answered no comment to all questions asked of him.
No knives linked to the stabbing have ever been found.
Defence
Brown’s case is that he was the victim of an attempted knifepoint robbery by Mr Butler. The stabbing happened when he tried to push the older man away with a knife of his own.
His barrister, Frida Hussain QC, asked eyewitness Donna Osbourne: “I suggest to you that Lee had been making threats or had planned to rob Ginge [Brown’s nickname] that day. You say it never happened and you don't know anything about that.”
She replied: “Lee was not that kind of character. To even suggest it is quite appalling.”
Earlier, Ms Osbourne scoffed at the suggestion Mr Butler wanted to steal money or drugs from ‘Ginge’.
Ms Hussain asked: “Did you know that Lee planned to rob Ginge?”
Ms Osbourne replied: “Lee had never stolen a penny sweet from a shop let alone a drug dealer.”
A number of the witnesses, including his customers, said they’d not had any problems with Brown – or ‘Ginge’ – in the past.
One, Kelly Gardner, told the jury that when she saw him on the day of Mr Butler’s death, Brown looked ‘angry and quite stressed like there was a lot on his mind’. But she accepted under cross-examination that it looked like he’d had ‘plenty to drink the night before’.
The jury was told that both Mr Butler and Brown had a link to knives. On June 2, 2021, Brown was seen to place a large knife into a rucksack outside the Spar shop in Barton. Two days after the stabbing, Mr Butler’s sister found three knives at her brother’s property – including one in a bag.
Brown is expected to say he was forced to deal drugs for the ‘Bob’ drugs line, with witnesses asked about a mystery ‘Jake’ who Ms Hussain suggested ‘never got his hands dirty’.
However, the suggestion of there being a top boy called ‘Jake’ was challenged by ‘Bob’ line customer Derek Greig.
“It was Lewis' round and you're just using him [Jake] as a scapegoat,” Mr Greig told Ms Hussain when he gave evidence on the trial’s third day.
Mr Greig, who claimed to have overdosed on drugs bought from the Barton drugs line, told jurors that the line was run by Brown and ‘Reece Chapman’ – with Colin Sumner also sent out to hand over drugs in an alleyway behind his Stowford Road flat.
Prosecutor Charles Ward-Jackson asked Mr Greig: "In all the time you were buying drugs from Lewis Brown did you ever see any sign he was being forced to do it by anyone else?"
The customer replied: “No, it was [Reece] and Lewis' round.”
- Brown, of Barton Village Road, Oxford, denies murder and possession of a bladed article. The trial continues.
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