MURDER TRIAL: '˜Son of Satan' stabbed businessman more than 30 times in garage

Engineer Ian Dollery, 51, was cutting his hair ahead of a family holiday the following day when Robert Kay, 49, a drug addict with schizophrenia, launched the savage and unprovoked attack.

Hours before the attack, friends saw Kay pick up a meat cleaver, claiming to be the son of Satan, as he drank and took drugs at a friend’s bedsit.

Rebecca Stevens, who had been drinking with Kay on the day of the attack, told Preston Crown Court: “I could sense something terrible was going to happen.”

Kay stabbed the father-of-three more than 30 times to his head, chest and abdomen with such force six of Mr Dollery’s ribs were broken and knife wounds penetrated his heart and stomach near his home in York Road, St Annes.

Mr Dollery’s wife Andrea, 51, and daughter Grace, 21, fought Kay off with a broom handle, screaming, in a bid to save him, the court was told.

Kay ran off and was arrested on St Annes Promenade a short time later.

Mr Dollery died in hospital in the early hours on June 19.

Opening the trial at Preston Crown Court, Simon Medland QC, prosecuting, said: “In this case the prosecution will not dispute that the defendant has, for a number of years, suffered from schizophrenia. That is a psychiatric illness.

“However we will invite you to conclude that although this is an important background fact in the case it is far from being the whole story and cannot be fairly divorced from the harsh truth that the defendant had, by his own choice, been on a prolonged drugs binge or bender in the days preceding his repeatedly stabbing Ian Dollery to death.

“No-one forced the defendant to take the drugs – it was his own choice.

“Further he knew by then that taking drugs in such huge quantities was very bad for him and made him behave in an unacceptable way.

“We will submit to you that the prevalent driver of the defendant’s behaviour on June 18 was his self-intoxication on alcohol and drugs. This intoxication greatly exacerbated such mental illness as he had.

“He had lived with his schizophrenia for a number of years without it causing him to behave as grossly violently as this before.”

Earlier that day Rebecca Stevens had been drinking with Kay, a friend of around 12 years, at a flat in St Andrews Road South, a short distance from the Dollery family’s home in York Road.

She said her friend had started acting in a way she hadn’t seen before, claiming to have a list of instructions from Satan, and saying he was “a million, trillion, billion years old.”

She told the court: “He was looking through me, like I wasn’t there. It was very, very weird. I could sense something terrible was going to happen and at about quarter to eight I left.”

Kay, of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility at an earlier hearing, but denies murder.

Andrew Webster QC, defending, said: “He fully accepts what he did represents everyone’s worst nightmare, killing an entirely innocent stranger who had done nothing at all to invite the attack on him.”

In a police interview Mrs Dollery said: “We had just been saying, this time tomorrow we’ll be in the sunshine.

“We really needed this holiday because we had been working so hard.

“He was in a really good mood.”

(Proceeding)