3 hours ago
9
A man who murdered a nine-year-old girl by stabbing her in the heart while she played with a hula hoop in the street has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years.
Deividas Skebas, 26, attacked Lilia Valutyte in the town centre of Boston, Lincolnshire, on 28 July 2022 while the girl was playing outside her mother’s embroidery shop.
A trial heard there was no dispute that Skebas, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, killed Lilia, but a jury was asked to decide what his state of mind was at the time of the attack.
The Lithuanian defendant, who told police he was being controlled by Nasa, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but was convicted of murder by a jury at Lincoln crown court on 5 February.
Skebas appeared by video link from Rampton hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital in Nottinghamshire, and stared ahead without reacting as Mr Justice Choudhury read out his sentence on Wednesday.
Skebas had entered the UK legally three weeks before killing Lilia and was working as a fruit picker.
Lilia’s mother, Lina Savickiene, in a victim impact statement read out by her husband and Lilia’s stepfather, Aurelijus Savickas, at the trial’s conclusion, wrote that the grief the family had suffered was “not something you recover from”.
Savickiene, who found her daughter after the attack and cradled her body, wrote that “sometimes terrifying thoughts overwhelm the mind and during this trial there have been many, many more. Why her? Why us? The questions remain unanswered.”
During the trial, the prosecutor Christopher Donnellan KC said the murder was “clearly a wicked act” and that Skebas was aware of the severity of the crime when he committed it. “He knew his conduct was wrong. He knew he was killing a child,” he said.
Representing Skebas, Andrew Campbell-Tiech KC told the jury there was no debate that his client had killed Lilia but that his mental state meant he should be convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Campbell-Tiech described Skebas as “quite obviously deluded” and said clinicians who had treated him doubted he would recover.
The court heard that after the killing, Skebas believed he had “the power to resurrect” Lilia but could only do so if the police contacted “his controller in Nasa”.
