Father-of-six, 55, ‘murdered daughter Mylee, after threatening her mother’

The brother of TV’s SAS Who Dares Wins star Mark Billingham stabbed his eight-year-old daughter to death when her mother came to collect the child from his bungalow, a court heard yesterday.

William Billingham, 55, threatened to kill ex-partner Tracey Taundry with the kitchen knife moments before plunging the weapon into ‘trusting and defenceless’ Mylee Billingham’s chest, jurors were told.

Opening his murder trial yesterday, prosecutor Karim Khalil QC warned the eight women and four men of the jury that the case would prove to be ‘particularly distressing’ as he urged them to ‘set emotion to one side and decide the case dispassionately’.

William Billingham, left, allegedly stabbed daughter Mylee, right, to death with a knife moments after threatening her mother with the weapon

Mark Billingham after his brother had been charged with stabbing Mylee

The barrister said Billingham ‘stabbed her (Mylee) to death by plunging a kitchen knife into her chest when she was alone with him in his house’, while he had been looking after the child this January.

Mr Khalil said that moments earlier, bisexual Miss Taundry had arrived at the property in Brownhills, West Midlands, to pick Mylee up, but was forced to flee when Billingham threatened to kill her on the doorstep with the same knife.

The court heard that a few months before the murder, Miss Taundry, 34, had started a relationship with a woman, a situation Billingham was struggling to deal with.

Mr Khalil said the defendant first met Miss Taundry when she was 19, but the relationship began to deteriorate in 2010, when she called police alleging that he had struck her.

Billingham later moved out into a flat on his own after another domestic incident in which police were called, Mr Khalil said. But the defendant remained in contact with Miss Taundry because of their three children and the couple were sometimes intimate – a situation Miss Taundry described as being ‘friends with benefits’.

But three months before the alleged murder, Miss Taundry began a relationship with female partner Lindsey Andrews.

Mr Khalil told jurors: ‘Ordinarily one wouldn’t discuss the sexual inclinations of a person in a criminal trial, but in this case, it may have particular importance.

The court heard Mylee, pictured, was attacked in front of her mother moments after she had arrived at Billingham’s home near Walsall to collect her

‘Mr Billingham had always known that Tracey was bisexual; it had often been a cause for light-hearted banter between them.’

But he said that the fact her new relationship was ‘not simply a one-off event, but seemed to be getting more serious, was something the defendant found difficult to deal with.’

The barrister said that although Billingham spoke of accepting the situation, his actions were ‘plainly hostile to this new situation’.

Mr Khalil described how Billingham had apparently hacked into her Facebook and used a key he had kept for her home in Brownhills to go in to her bedroom and dress up in her knickers when she was out.

Billingham, who the court heard had worked shifts as an injection-moulder, sent Miss Taundry a photograph of himself wearing the knickers with the caption: ‘Your new knickers which I have broken in for your new girlfriend – you may want to wash them’.

Jurors heard that while the couple had been living together at the property in 2011, Billingham, who had three older children from two other women, caught Miss Taundry texting another man and took her phone.

Birmingham Crown Court heard Miss Taundry assumed he had thrown it away but just weeks before allegedly knifing their daughter the defendant sent her a picture of the handset beside its cut up Sim card.

The murder took place at a bungalow in Brownhills which Billingham had moved to just a month before the killing. Jurors were told he had become eligible to move to the property after being diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, which causes difficulties with breathing and caused him to be signed off work.

Bespectacled Billingham, who wore a black bomber jacket in the dock, denies making a threat to kill Miss Taundry and murdering Mylee.

Mr Khalil told jurors that while much of the factual evidence in the case was not in dispute, Billingham had provided an account of the build-up to Mylee’s death, but ‘claimed to have no memory of the events themselves’.

The prosecutor added: ‘He has therefore provided little by way of explanation for what he did.

‘We say that, whether he has genuinely blanked out the events from his memory, or whether he is choosing to refuse to say what he can remember, he is guilty of threatening to kill his former partner and guilty of murdering his daughter.

‘Whether or not he can remember the events does not affect his responsibility for them.’

The case continues.