NOTTINGHAMSHIRE TEEN SENTENCED TO LIFE FOR MUM'S MURDER AFTER FIRE
After fire ravaged a house in the quiet suburban street of Georgia Drive, Redhill, neighbours learned doting mum Jacqui Bartlam had been found dead inside.One said at the time "you see things like that on the TV but when you know the person, you just can't believe it".
The fire was no accident.
Police found Jacqui, 47, had died from head injuries and they were treating her death as murder.
Soon their attention turned her own son - 14-year-old Daniel Bartlam.
Bartlam lived with his mother, younger brother and dog in Georgia Drive.
He was a member of a film club, liked Star Wars, Doctor Who and playing games on his computer.
But he had developed an obsession with Coronation Street villain John Stape, who battered stalker Charlotte Hoyle with a hammer before leaving her body in the wreckage of a tram crash to cover up his crime.
Bartlam immersed himself in his fantasy world to such an extent the boundaries between real life and fiction became tragically blurred, the court at his trial had heard.
On Easter Monday 2011, he acted out a script he had written on his computer – about a boy called Daniel Bartlam who bludgeoned his mother to death.
This gave him a defence in law of “loss of control” which, if proved, would reduce an allegation of murder to manslaughter.
But, by their unanimous guilty verdict to murder, the jury rejected his defence.
The judge said: “Whilst there clearly were arguments between you and your mother, not untypical between mothers and their teenage children, I am quite satisfied there was no physical or verbal abuse by your mother, such as you alleged in your evidence at trial.” The judge gave him a life sentence and ordered he serve a minimum of 16 years before parole, and he described it as a “grotesque and senseless killing”.
At the time the Post asked for reporting restrictions to be lifted that prevented Bartlam, then 15, from being named.
Bartlam had attended independent primary school Greenholme, Lenton, and then Dagfa School, Beeston.
He moved to Christ the King School, Arnold, after his parents’ divorce.
Realising the finger of suspicion would turn on him, he admitted he killed his mother, but claimed that he had been driven to it by her physical and verbal abuse.
