A woman accused of murdering her boyfriend after stabbing him in the heart previously left him "looking like the Elephant Man" in another assault, his auntie has claimed.
Natalie Bennett is currently standing trial at Liverpool Crown Court charged with the murder of her partner Kasey Anderson. He died a week before his 25th birthday in March this year after being slashed several times with a knife and suffering two stab wounds.
Mr Anderson called 999 as he lay gravely injured in the street outside his 47-year-old girlfriend's home on Carr Lane East in Croxteth and told call handlers "he was dying". Bennett then claimed to the police that he had arrived at her home "like that".
READ MORE: Live updates as Natalie Bennett appears in court over Kasey Anderson murder
His aunt Denise Anderson was called to give evidence to the jury today, Wednesday. She described how she spoke to her nephew in the moments after he was knifed, having returned a missed call she had received from Bennett's number.
Ms Anderson reported that Kasey was on the other end and told her: "Ring me an ambulance, please ring me an ambulance. I’ve been stabbed.
"I’ve been stabbed. I’m dying."
Ms Anderson instructed him to ring for an ambulance as she did not know Bennett's address, then informed his dad Graham – who made his way to the scene. She said she then repeatedly attempted to phone the number back and eventually spoke to the defendant on the phone.
The witness told the jury: "I asked her what she’d done. She shouted back ‘it’s always me, isn’t it?’.
"I got the height of abuse. She’s gonna come down and t**t the head off my shoulders."
Ms Anderson said that Kasey, who had lived with her and his grandma for "most of his life", had been in what was described as a "toxic" relationship with Bennett for around five years. She recalled one occasion when she was "busy upstairs, cleaning" during "2020, in the lockdown", saying: "She rang the doorbell, he answered.
"I could hear shouting from Ms Bennett. He was just standing in the porch not saying nothing.
"All I heard was yeah and no. There wasn’t a raised voice from him.
"She walked away. She come back, I was halfway down the stairs.
"She drew her head back, I thought she was gonna headbutt him. She just spat all over his face, so I run out.
"I moved him out the way, actually pushed him out the way. I said 'keep away from my lad, keep away from my house'.
"'If you ever spit at him again in a pandemic and he brings anything into my mum, I’m phoning the police'. She just laughed."
Ms Anderson said she had seen her nephew with injuries such as "a few black eyes" on "maybe seven or eight" occasions around this time. She added: "He never come out with a straight answer, he’d go to me and my mum 'I’m a lover, not a fighter'."
Richard Pratt KC, prosecuting, then asked her about an incident in February 2022 when Mr Anderson arrived home at around 7am. Ms Anderson tearfully said on the stand: "He normally comes into my room, 'are you awake?'.
"I was already up in the room. He went into his room and shut the door.
"Then I heard him sobbing. Really, really, really sobbing.
"I go in. He couldn’t lift his face up.
"When I seen his face, he’d been absolutely battered. His eyes.
"His face looked like the Elephant Man. Two of his eyes were up.
"One of them was closing as I was looking at him. His neck had scratches all down him.
"His t-shirt was ripped. His mouth was a little bit swollen this side, his right hand side.
"His face was swollen. As I was trying to tend to him, he was sobbing.
"I went to get a cloth to try and get the swelling down. I asked him who done it.
"I was crying. I was asking what happened, 'who’s done this?'.
"He wouldn’t answer me. He just couldn’t.
"He was uncontrollably crying. There was a big bang on my porch door, on the window.
"I ran down the stairs. I opened my front door.
"There was a mark on me window. I opened my porch door.
"I got out and I seen what I thought was a little kid, a kid about 13, 14. Hood up.
"There was a mark on my window of a brick. (The brick) was by the plant pot, it didn’t smash.
"As I come down the ramp, there was a taxi. Someone hurriedly hunched to get in.
"I shouted 'you little rat', because I thought it was a kid. Natalie Bennett turned around, there was a lot of swearing at me.
"I said 'what have you been doing?'. 'What have you done to him?'."
Bennett reportedly replied: "I never done it, it wasn’t me. I’ve never done it."
Ms Anderson said she told her to "f*** off", at which Bennett "got angry and come into my gate shouting the odds". She recalled: "I told her to go away and leave him alone, I told her to leave him alone and stop what she’s doing to him."
By now, Mr Anderson had left his bedroom and gone outside. Ms Anderson said: "He was asking me to go in, 'leave it, go in', but I couldn’t.
"She’d done that to a kid. How can you do that to a kid?
"She was going out the gate and she dragged me by my head. She kept pulling my head down.
"She’s on one side of the gate, I’m on this side. Kasey came out.
"I said 'don’t touch her, I’ll do it'. I don’t know where I got it from, but I brought my fist and hit her there and she let go."
Ms Anderson said that Bennett had a "tiny cut" to the top of her head which Mr Anderson had allegedly caused by throwing a mobile phone at her. She said from the witness box: "She was letting the rain go on it.
"It was bleeding more than it was. It was trickling down the side of her face.
"She went 'he done that to me, threw the phone at me'. I said 'did you?'.
"He said 'I threw a phone, but it wasn’t meant to hit her'. He threw the phone.
"Kasey being Kasey, nice kid, brought her into my back kitchen to wipe her face with the blood coming down. She kept saying to him 'you love me, I love you, you love me'.
"I told her to go out my house. She said 'come on mate, come with me', and then walked.
"I asked him not to go. I said 'don’t go mate, come back in', and he walked off."
Ms Anderson, who described the couple as "stinking of ale" at the time, took a tissue from her pocket and sobbed as she added: "He just walked off. He shut the gate and I watched him walk away with her."
Stanley Reiz KC, defending, then cross-examined the witness on Bennett's behalf. Ms Anderson was asked about an occasion on which she "kicked him out" of her house in October 2022.
She said of this: "He came back to me in December. He went to stay with his mum because he’d been drinking.
"I don’t like that. He was back at Christmas, he was fine, he wasn’t drinking, he wasn’t taking the tablets that Ms Bennett used to give him.
"He was back to Kasey, he was back to my lad. Two weeks before all this happened, he started drinking again.
"He wasn’t good and I didn’t want him back in my house, I asked him would he go back to his mum’s. Whether he went back there or not, I don’t know."
Mr Reiz asked whether Mr Anderson's "personality was changing", to which she said: "When she was with Ms Bennett, she had his head battered. You weren’t there, you don’t understand the things I heard her say to him on the phone.
"I’d be shouting to him, put the phone down. She battered that kid’s head.
"She’s a manipulator, she’s a groomer. That’s what she done to my lad, groomed him.
"He did change a bit over the years, but he was still the happy go lucky kid we knew. He wasn’t violent, but when he was there he went a little bit down and his mental health went down a lot.
"I wanted her to keep away from my lad. She’s destroying his life, she’s destroying my Kasey’s life – a 23-year-old lad.
"She was destroying him. She was destroying my lad’s life, she didn’t care.”
Ms Anderson then took her glasses off and sat sobbing in the witness box. She added: "She doesn’t care what she does to anyone."
Mr Reiz then asked about in incident which saw the police called to her home on October 3 2022, when Mr Anderson was said to have been "off his head" and allegedly "screaming that he was going to murder everyone". He then "grabbed a knife from the kitchen and ran out of the house with it".
Ms Anderson said of this: "I come home from work. I said to him, 'you’re a bit late going to work'.
"Ms Bennett arrives in a taxi. I said 'why don’t you leave him alone, let him go to work, that’s all he wants to do'."
Bennett was then reported to have said "you can't help who you fall in love with". Ms Anderson continued: "I called her a paedophile, told her to leave him alone."
She asked Mr Anderson "are you not going to work?", but he "smiled, got in the taxi and waved". He was then said to have returned "just over two-and-a-half hours later".
Ms Anderson said: "He was gone. He wasn’t Kasey.
"There was no life in his eyes, there was nothing. The kid fell to the floor."
Mr Anderson reportedly said: "Please help, please help, me head’s battered. I want me nan.
"I miss me nan, please help me. Me head’s gone."
Ms Anderson added: "He didn’t know what he was doing or where he was. It wasn’t him in his eyes.
"He was just really erratic, very anxious. He was like 'who are you and who are you?'.
"He didn’t know who anyone was. He didn’t know who his best mate was.
"He went 'yous’ll all die'. He never said he was gonna kill us. 'yous will all die'.
"And then he just ran out with the knife. He wasn’t attacking anyone."
Ms Anderson said she phoned her brother, Kasey's dad Graham, who attended the scene but was punched by her nephew. She continued: "It’s the first time I’ve ever seen my boy like that."
At the end of her evidence, she added before leaving the courtroom in tears: "We all know what she done. We all know what she done.
"I tried. I tried."
Mr Pratt told the jury of four men and eight women during the prosecution's opening on Tuesday that Bennett's next door neighbours "heard raised voices" coming from the address at around 5.30pm on Saturday, March 11, before finding Mr Anderson "banging and kicking at their door" roughly 45 minutes later. The 24-year-old was apparently "seeking help", although the occupants were described as being "frightened by the disturbance" and instead called the police.
He too dialled 999 while sitting seriously injured on their doorstep to report that he had been stabbed. Mr Anderson "repeatedly told the operator that he was dying" but added that he "did not know who had stabbed him or where they were".
Many of his answers were said to have been "incoherent", with the casualty left vomiting such were the severity of his wounds. The call handler could hear Bennett's voice in the background though and asked to speak to her instead, at which point she "effectively took over the call".
She told the operator that Mr Anderson had "stab wounds all over him" which she believed were "a bit deep". But the defendant claimed that she did not know who had stabbed him, saying: "He's come in like that."
He was later found to have suffered superficial slash wounds to his neck, right shoulder, lower back and left forearm, as well as a "shallow" stab wound to his right lower leg. But Mr Anderson had also sustained a "deep stab wound" to his chest, which damaged his left lung and heart.
After being rushed to Aintree Hospital, he underwent "what was hoped to be life-saving surgery" but died 20 days later in the early hours of March 31 – just over a week shy of what would have been his 25th birthday on April 8. Mr Pratt said: "The medical evidence suggests that this was not just one blow with a knife, but one of several wounds.
"The slash wounds may have been superficial in nature and the stab to the leg may be of a shallow depth, but together they demonstrate a concerted attack which provides the background for the fatal wound to the chest. It is our case that Natalie Bennett lied to the operator because she knew full well what she had done and had no excuse for it."
Mr Pratt said that Ring doorbell footage recovered from the neighbour's house showed Bennett "holding a knife to the head of the distraught and injured Mr Anderson" with her right hand and "using it either to strike Kasey Anderson in the head or at the very least hold it close to his head". He added: "Thus, we suggest, she continued to demonstrate hostility towards him even after she must have known she had stabbed him in the chest."
When officers arrived, she again alleged that he had arrived at her home "like that" and claimed that the first time she had seen him that evening was when she heard him banging on her next door neighbour's home. Bennett would subsequently give no comment to detectives under interview, but it is anticipated that she will claim during the trial that she inflicted Mr Anderson's fatal wound "in lawful self-defence".
Crime scene investigators later discovered a clump of her hair on the floor of the house, which appeared to have been "forcibly removed" from her head. A "number of sharp implements" were meanwhile found in the kitchen sink, "having apparently been soaked in water at least" and with no blood found upon them while the address was said to have "smelled strongly of cleaning fluids".
Bennett denies murder. The trial, before Judge Denis Watson KC, continues.
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