PCSO ‘killer hid in the woods before murdering off-duty cop with metal railway jack in brutal attack’

A SUSPECTED killer “hid in the woods before pouncing” on an off-duty cop and murdering her with a “metal railway jack”, a court has heard.

Callum Wheeler, 22, accepts that he killed police community support officer Julia James but denies her murder, jurors have been told.

Opening his trial at Canterbury Crown Court on Monday, prosecutor Alison Morgan QC said that Mrs James was ambushed in woodland near her home in Snowdown, Kent on April 27 last year. 

She told the jury: “The evidence suggests that her attacker was waiting in the woods for someone to attack and then ambushed her.

“Julia tried to escape her attacker but she was subjected to a brutal and fatal attack.

“She suffered catastrophic injuries and died where she fell.”

Ms Morgan said it is the prosecution’s case “that there is a large body of evidence from a variety of sources that demonstrate that the attacker was this defendant Callum Wheeler.”

She told the court: “Although he denied responsibility for the killing for some time, he does now accept that he was the person that killed Julia James.

“However he does not accept that he is guilty of the offence of murder.”

Callum Wheeler allegedly killed Julia James, 53, near Ackholt Wood, close to her home in the hamlet of Snowdown, Kent, on April 27 last year.

And in a chilling piece of evidence, the moment Mrs James tried to make her escape from her killer was captured in heart rate and walking speed data recorded by her Apple Watch, Canterbury Crown Court heard.

Ms Morgan said: “We saw now the pace she was going at and the moment her pace radically changed and that’s plotted by the data from her own watch.”

She added: “We also know about her heart rate. A relatively stable heart rate through the part when she was walking. That at 14:30 and 36 seconds her heart rate was 97 beats per minute.”

Ms Morgan QC said moments later it had “launched” to 145 beats per minute, adding: “And that launch is something I will come back to as to where she was and details the escape she was doubtless trying to make at that moment.

“It was at that point that her heart rate surged.”

Morgan told the jury that Wheeler repeatedly visited the woodland where Ms James would regularly walk her Jack Russell dog Toby.

PREVIOUS SIGHTINGS

The victim had seen a man alleged to be her killer, Callum Wheeler, a number of times in the woods where she was killed in the months prior to her death, Canterbury Crown Court has heard.

Morgan said: “On one of those earlier occasions when he was in Ackholt Wood, he saw and was seen by Julia James herself.”

Mrs James later pointed out the male, alleged to have been Wheeler, to husband Paul James during a walk together in February 2021, around two months before her death.

She is understood to have describe the suspect to her husband as “a strange male” and “really weird dude”.

Jurors were then played footage from police body-worn video of an encounter between officers and Wheeler when he dialled 999 on April 17, 10 days before Mrs James died.

Ms Morgan told the jury: “He did not give a coherent reason for calling the police and he did not invite the police officers into his property.”

The footage showed Wheeler telling the officers “get lost mate” and “I’m not talking to you”, before his father reassured them he was OK.

Ms Morgan said: “You may think that the footage of this visit shows the defendant to be behaving oddly” and told the court that he had been reluctant to have “any meaningful conversation with the police”

Wheeler, from Aylesham in Kent, denies murder and is set to face trial at Canterbury Crown Court before judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb.