‘Self-pitying’ husband accused of murdering his wife and 12 year old daughter

A ‘self-pitying’ husband stabbed his 12 year old daughter to death and suffocated his wife after she began a relationship with a colleague at the Homebase store where she worked, a court has heard. 

Police found the bodies of Jillu Nash, 43, and 12-year-old Louise at their home in Great Waldingfield, Suffolk, while 47-year-old Peter Nash was found covered in blood and holding a knife.

Nash, who had moved with his family from Leicester to the Sudbury area of Suffolk in 2018, had stabbed himself in the chest multiple times and tried to gas himself to death, prosecutor David Josse KC said. 

He said that the defendant murdered his family either late on September 7 or early on September 8 last year.

In a video played to jurors at Ipswich Crown Court, a Taser officer is heard yelling at Nash: ‘There’s a red dot on you, drop the knife.’ Nash denies two counts of murder.

The court heard that Mrs Nash’s Homebase colleague, Mark Leamey, had become concerned when she did not respond to his messages late on September 7, nor on the morning of September 8. 

He visited a Tesco store where Mrs Nash also worked part-time, and then Louise’s school, before visiting her family’s home. Police were called when there was no response at the door.

The prosecutor said Mr and Mrs Nash married in 2009, and at the time Mrs Nash was an Indian national. She applied for leave to remain in the UK as the spouse of a British national in 2010, and their daughter was born soon after.

Mr Josse said Mrs Nash’s life ‘rather flourished’ in Suffolk. But he said that Nash – who has chosen to represent himself in his trial instead of accepting free legal representation by a barrister – was made redundant from Philips Electronics in the summer of 2020, and that the couple ‘had a difficult and unhappy marriage’.

The prosecutor said Mrs Nash died of compression of the neck, and Louise died of a single stab wound to the abdomen, adding that after the alleged double-murder, police looked at Mrs Nash’s phone and found what appeared to be videos she had secretly made of her conversations with her husband about her infidelity.

In one clip he tells her: ‘You’re a validated cheater’. In a second, Nash asks his wife: ‘The one you’re cheating with – is he at Homebase, or Tesco, or is he a friend of the family?’

In a third, recorded less than a fortnight before the deaths, Nash accuses his wife of being ‘a schemer’. He told her: ‘You cause chaos, you try to cause drama to get attention.’

And in a fourth clip, he says: ‘The past four months you’ve been cheating,’ She tells him it is actually ‘eight months’.

Police found the bodies of Louise (left) and Jillu at their home in Great Waldingfield, Suffolk

Mr Josse said: ‘Having killed his wife and his daughter, the defendant made a determined attempt to try to cover up – not so much the killing, but some of the evidence behind it. He attempted to destroy his telephone, his wife’s telephone and made some attempt, as well, at their home computer.’

The prosecutor said police managed to access Mrs Nash’s phone, where the videos were stored, but had not been able to access the defendant’s phone. Police also examined a computer tower from the family home.

Mr Josse said that three TikTok videos were accessed by the defendant at 6.25am, which he said showed the ’embittered and self-pitying mindset from which the defendant had become entrenched’.

One of the clips he watched had the text: ‘A broken man who has rebuilt himself is very dangerous’. A second said: ‘Tell me why, when anything gets rough in a relationship, women are told to leave him and men are told to try and fix things.’

The third, which showed Kermit the Frog by a fire, said: ‘Do girls actually feel for hurting a guy or do they just say their apologies and never think about how she affected his life again.’

The defendant was not in the dock at the hearing on Thursday, and the judge, Mr Justice Edward Murray, addressed jurors about this. He said: ‘You will see that the defendant isn’t here today, but you shouldn’t speculate about the reason for his absence.’ The trial continues.