True Crime Case Histories - Volume 1 (HARDCOVER)

Chapter 1: James Patterson Smith

On an April afternoon in 1996, a man calmly walked into a Manchester, England, police station to report that his girlfriend had accidentally drowned in his bathtub. The man was forty-eight-year-old James Patterson Smith, and his girlfriend was just a seventeen-year-old child. The police later learned that Smith was a sadistic, controlling psychopath. Not only had the girl drowned, but she had been subjected to three weeks of some of the most brutal torture England had ever seen. The horrific crime scene brought seasoned police officers to tears. 


* * *


Kelly Anne Bates was mature for her age. At age fourteen, when Kelly told her parents, Margaret and Tommy Bates, that she had a boyfriend, they thought nothing of it. As any parent would, they assumed she had a teenage crush on a young boy from school. 


Wanting to raise their children with a sense of independence, they gave Kelly a long leash and let her see her boyfriend as she pleased. However, it wasn’t long before Kelly started staying out overnight, and her worried parents called the police. When Kelly finally came home, she told them she had been staying at her friend Rachel’s house – but her parents had a sinking feeling that her story wasn’t true.


They weren’t the only ones concerned about Kelly’s whereabouts. Even though they had never met him, Kelly’s boyfriend “Dave” occasionally called to ask where she was. Her parents didn’t realize at the time that Dave was already tightening his control over their daughter.


Kelly managed to keep her parents from meeting Dave for a full two years, until she was sixteen. That’s when she broke the news: she was dropping out of school and moving in with him. Her parents were livid and called both social services and the police for help. Unfortunately Kelly was sixteen, and according to UK laws, the authorities couldn’t do anything. Kelly’s parents demanded to meet her boyfriend, Dave.


When Margaret and Tommy finally met Dave, they were shocked to find that he was not a boy but a full-grown man. Kelly and Dave told her parents that he was thirty-two years old, but even that wasn’t true. They later discovered he was actually forty-eight – older than Kelly’s father at the time.


Dave’s age wasn’t the only thing they hid from her parents. Dave wasn’t “Dave” at all: his name was actually James Patterson Smith.


Though mature for her age, Kelly was still young and naïve. She was flattered to have an older man so interested in her, but she didn’t realize that their relationship was more about power and control than love. Smith controlled everything the young girl did from that point on.


Kelly’s demeanor slowly changed. She was no longer the bright, bubbly girl her mother knew, and they gradually saw less and less of her. When she finally showed up at her parent’s home again, she seemed troubled and depressed but refused to admit anything was wrong.


Kelly had bruises on her arms and face. Her parents’ concerns reached a new level when she came home one day with the whole side of her face black from bruising.


Kelly lied and told her mother she’d been jumped by a group of girls who had beaten her up. Each time she showed up with new injuries, her story changed. Her parents had no idea that Smith had a long history of violence towards young women.


Margaret could clearly see that her daughter had been abused and went to the police, who told her to have a doctor examine Kelly so they could document the abuse. But again, Kelly was sixteen and considered an adult. Her mother was helpless. Unless Kelly went in of her own accord, neither her parents nor the police could do anything.


Kelly’s mother could see that the violence was escalating when Kelly showed up with a horrible bite mark on her arm. But again, Kelly shrugged it off and claimed that she had fallen and caught her arm on a chain-link fence.


In November 1995, Margaret pleaded with Kelly to leave Smith, but it only seemed to anger her. She told her mother she would be seeing much less of her. Unfortunately, that was the last time Margaret saw Kelly alive.


Over the following months, Kelly phoned her mother and told her that she was working long hours and weekends at a factory – that was why she hadn’t stopped by to visit. Eventually, however, the phone calls stopped altogether.


In March 1996, Margaret received a Mother’s Day card and a birthday card for Kelly’s father, Tommy. Both were obviously not written in Kelly’s handwriting; Smith was now in complete control and toying with them.


* * *


On April 17, 1996, James Patterson Smith walked into the Gorton Police Department and reported that his girlfriend had drowned in his bathtub. Police arrived at a horrific bloodbath that was much more than a drowning.


Seventeen-year-old Kelly Anne Bates had indeed drowned in the bathtub, but she had also been held prisoner for at least three weeks and suffered torture beyond imagination.


The pathologist’s report revealed 150 separate injuries, including having her eyes gouged out, stab wounds inside her eye sockets, and mutilation of her mouth, ears, nose, and genitalia. In addition, she had been scalded with boiling water, burned with a hot iron, stabbed and cut with knives, forks, pruning shears, and scissors, her head was partially scalped, and her knees had been kicked in.


Literally every room in the house had traces of Kelly’s blood. Evidence revealed that Kelly’s hair had been tied to a radiator, and her eyes were gouged out at least a week before her death. She hadn’t received water for several days and had been starved, having lost about forty-five pounds.


Investigations revealed that there was a progressive pattern with Smith. They found that he had been married years before and divorced due to his violence against his wife. After the divorce, he dated a twenty-year-old who testified that he had used her as a “punching bag” even while she was pregnant. Their relationship ended when he tried to drown her. After that, he had a relationship with a fifteen-year-old girl who testified that he held her head underwater.


At the trial, Smith denied the murder charges and believed he was justified in his torture. Smith claimed that Kelly taunted him about the death of his mother and that she only had herself to blame. He also claimed she had “a habit of hurting herself to make it look worse on me.” When asked why he gouged out her eyes, he said, “She dared me to do it.”


The jury didn’t even need a full hour to come back with a guilty verdict. The evidence and photos seen at the trial were so horrific that, after the trial, the jury members were offered psychological counseling. Every jury member accepted.


James Patterson Smith was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty years. Kelly was buried the day before her eighteenth birthday.