Valerie Graves: Burglar admits killing grandmother in her bed with hammer as he ransacked home
Accused tells Romanian court: ‘I never did any harm in my life. Someone told me there was a lot of money in that house – I never went there to kill someone’
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A burglar accused of killing grandmother Valerie Graves while she was in bed six years ago has made a dramatic courtroom confession in his native Romania.
Cristian Sabou admitted smashing the 55-year-old with a claw hammer after she woke up as he ransacked the West Sussex seaside cottage that she was house sitting in 2013.
The 27-year-old told an extradition hearing: “I did not mean to harm her. It was an accident … I never did any harm in my life.
“Someone told me there was a lot of money in that house – I never went there to kill someone. I thought everybody was away.”
He added: “She was sleeping in bed, she woke up and she surprised me. I panicked. I had a hammer with me. I did not mean to harm her.”
The extraordinary confession on Thursday came a day after Sabou was arrested in the Transylvanian town of Dej by police serving a European arrest warrant.
The long-unsolved slaying – which occurred between Christmas and New Year – had been nicknamed the Midsomer Murder because it occurred near where a 1998 episode of the ITV whodunit was filmed.
Ms Graves, an artist from London, had been staying at the property of a friend in the village of Bosham at the time of the burglarly.
She was sleeping in the only downstairs bedroom, while her sister Janet, 60, mother Eileen, 87, and Janet’s partner Nigel Acres, 59, were all upstairs.
Her sister found her bludgeoned body when she took in a breakfast tea the next morning. She had suffered multiple head and facial wounds in what police described as a frenzied assault.
At Thursday’s extradition hearing, Sabou, who lived in England for five years, was not asked to enter a plea but made the confession anyway, the Daily Mail reports.
“I was young, 21, childish, without a job, I did not have much money, it was my first time in England,” he told the court.
Asked what he had to say to the family of Ms Graves, he added: “‘I’m very sorry, I’m really sorry.”
Sabou agreed to the application by Sussex Police to take him back to the UK to face a charge of murder.
Judge Claudia Ilies ruled he would be flown to the UK within 10 days but added that if he was sentenced to prison, he would be allowed to serve his sentence in Romania, as he had requested.