Today’s story, from 2019, comes from Widnes, a town on the north bank of the river Mersey about fifteen miles south-east of Liverpool and around two hundred miles north-west of London. Traditionally known as a major centre of the once thriving chemical industry, I associate Widnes with rugby league on Grandstand when I was growing up on pitches just mud with no grass in atrocious weather. Sporty Spice went to school in Widnes.
Today’s story begins at a pub just outside Widnes, the Hammer & Pincers in Hough Green. Despite the best efforts of politicians to make it almost impossible for the UK pub to stay open, some still manage to thrive, and they are a central point and vital to the lives of so many in the community. This is almost always down to those who run the pub, and this was certainly the case at the Hammer & Pincers. When we join the story today, the 49-year-old Christian Thornton was the landlord of the Hammer & Pincers and a very popular landlord he was too, who worked closely with the many charities in the community. He didn’t take any nonsense, but he was a kind, good-humoured man who took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously. He loved rugby – playing and watching, but his real love was his family. He ran the pub with his wife Pamela, and they had three children to whom Christian was a top dad, always making time for them despite the pressures of his demanding career.
The family had run the pub for sixteen years and it had a good reputation. The pub was a nice one with a good set of customers and not known for trouble, although there were always one or two who overstepped the mark, who Christian had to be very direct with and on occasion bar from the premises, for the safety of the other customers and the staff.
One of these was a thirty-five-year-old local man, Lee Abbot. An ex-kickboxer, he wasn’t the brightest and enjoyed drinking to excess and taking other substances. But he had an aggressive streak, especially when he had been drinking. Christian kept a close eye on him when he was in the premises. But one night in July 2019, Abbot’s behaviour was poor, but more worrying was that some female customers told Christian that Abbot had been bragging to them that he had been carrying a knife. Christian didn’t say anything to Abbot as he didn’t want to escalate the situation, but as far as he was concerned Abbot was now banned from his pub.
Not long after, Christian told Abbot and two pals – who were said to be taking drugs – to leave the area close to the pub. Abbot wasn’t happy, but the three moved on.
Then on 2 August, Abbot showed up again, so Christian told him that he was barred from the pub, again not giving a reason as he didn’t want to antagonise him. Abbot was sober and reasonable and seemed to accept the ruling and even shook Christian’s hand as he left, so all seemed ok.
But the day after it was quite a different picture. Abbott came back aggressive and clearly drunk and volatile demanding an explanation from Christian about why he was no longer welcome. Christian again declined to provide one. Abbot lost it and shouted at staff behind the bar, stuck two fingers up at the CCTV and threatened to burn down the pub – which you recall was where Christian and his wife lived with their three children. Not a threat he could dismiss lightly even from an idiot like Abbot. He called the police, but the recording suggests he wasn’t unduly worried. In it Christian says:
“My name is Christian, as in the religion, Thornton as in the chocolates, but no relation,” He laughed as he spoke, before continuing: “I have a pub, I asked him to leave last night, he left, he’s come back this afternoon, I’m not 100% certain whether he’s had a drink, but he’s threatened to burn me down, I won’t have a pub by the end of today. I’ve got children, a wife and a dog, I might swap the wife and the dog around in that order, it depends.” At the end of the call, the operator asked Christian if he thought he was serious with his threats. He replied: “I’ve always been under the impression that you always fear the quiet man, not the one who shouts his mouth off…”
The police popped to the pub late that night to see how Christian wanted to proceed. He told them he wasn’t interested in escalating the matter to criminal charges, but he would appreciate them speaking to Abbot and asking him to steer clear of the pub. An eminently sensible approach and one you would expect from a professional, who wanted to take the heat out of the situation, but also make it clear to Abbot that he was serious.
At the regular meeting of the local PubWatch group on 6 August, Christian reported Abbot’s behaviour to the other members. The group decided that they would ban him from every pub in the group in the local area for twelve months. This was an official decision, and it was via the council that Abbot received this news via letter on 9 August. Again, it was absolutely the right response from a responsible pub landlord.
It was on a normal Sunday afternoon a few weeks later, Sunday, August 11, when Christian was enjoying a darts practice session with other members of the darts team at the pub. It was mid-afternoon, just after 3.15pm when Abbot came into the pub. He didn’t come through the main door but by the fire escape which was adjacent to the darts area. When Christian clocked him, he made it was clear that he was barred from the pub and pushed outside – bear in mind here that Christian wasn’t a massive until, but he was 5’10 inches tall and a good seventeen stone, so not somebody easily pushed about.
Abbot was on one. And the session had started the night before with wine and cocaine before a trip to the supermarket that morning to keep the session in play. This time he bought a number of bottles of strong cider and quickly got through them, before he headed to Christian’s pub.
Witnesses to the confrontation said that the two men properly squared up in the pub. When Abbot grabbed Christian’s neck and pushed him, accusing him of slashing his hands with his darts, Christian was very calm, putting his darts down and calling 999. He showed Abbot the phone screen so that there was no doubt exactly what he was doing.
This seemed to have the right impact on Abbot who walked away. But then he ran towards Christian at full speed and when he was almost level with him, from his rucksack he brought out a massive kitchen knife. The next fifty-two seconds of dreadful violence was all covered on the pub’s cctv cameras. Abbot stabbed Christian eleven times, into his lungs and his heart and then when Christian was doubled over, Abbot stabbed him deeply in the back, so much so that he caused a terrible open wound to his stomach. Somehow, Christian was able to punch Abbot in the head and this was enough for Abbot to run away. The scene he left behind was one of absolute horror as Christian lay in front of his wife and thirteen-year-old son, his life ebbing away in front of them. Despite the best efforts of those at the pub and the emergency services, Christian Thornton died at the scene.
Abbot ran off to a friend’s house where he changed out of his clothes which were soaked in blood and washed them and put them on a radiator to dry. It was only an hour or so after the attack that the police arrived where Abbott came out of the house in a pair of borrowed boxer shorts. On seeing the officers, he said: “I’ve done it – I’ll admit everything. I attacked that Chris, yeah. It’s all me, it’s all my fault right, yeah. I’ll admit everything, I’m not going to deny nothing – that’s the way it is. I’m guilty of everything you say – you don’t need any evidence; I stabbed him to fuck.
Detectives weren’t surprised to see that Abbot had a considerable criminal record. He first came to the attention of police in 1998 when he was fourteen, and he was convicted of shoplifting and burglary. Other convictions occurred in the next three years, including assault. But the seriousness of his actions ratcheted up significantly when he was seventeen when he was accused of attempted murder. Abbot approached a man who had had some sort of scuffle with his brother earlier but as we know from what we have heard already, a fair fight isn’t what a coward like Abbot wants. Instead, he was carrying a claw hammer and hit the man over the head with it a number of times. He was lucky to survive as this brutal attack had caused a compound fracture to the skull. It was clear that Abbot had been intending to kill and for that crime, he received an eight-year detention order and was released after just four years. Since then, astonishingly, his record did not include any major violence with the main ones being convictions for drink driving in 2009 and dangerous driving, again when drunk, in 2017.
In custody Abbot was equally open about his actions saying, “I’m guilty as sin. I tell you, no fucking issue at all.” But sober the next day, he told officers that he was schizophrenic and being treated under the Mental Health Act, but these were lies as even a cursory check showed. When asked what he had been trying to achieve in the attack he said, “obviously I knew I was gonna hurt him, I knew I was gonna stab him”, but he was very clear that murder was not his intent. His initial lariness and boldness was entirely gone at the end of a second interview when he told officers: “I’ve took the bloody kids’ dad away… tell them I’m, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never meant to take him.” But you would maybe expect someone who professed to have these feelings to not put his victim’s family and friends through the ordeal of a full trial. But not Abbot.
At the trial which took place in Liverpool Crown Court Abbot pleaded not guilty to murder, admitting the lesser charge of manslaughter. Christian’s wife Pamela sat through every day of a harrowing trial, listening to all the horrific details and unfortunately, this was made even worse by the behaviour of Abbot. On this podcast we talk a lot about once in court why don’t defendants just show some basic respect for the friends and family of the victim – Abbot unfortunately certainly didn’t do this.
The journalist at the Liverpool Echo newspaper in three short paragraphs, described very vividly and expertly what happened next so let me read it verbatim to you:
“Shifting his weight from foot to foot, waving his arms and repeatedly banging the lectern to drive home his point, Lee Abbott moaned: “This is the shit I’ve had to live with for pissing years. For several minutes without interruption, the defendant on trial for murder had ranted and raved about the series of terrible events he said had made his life a living hell. The death of his dad due to medical negligence. A friend killed by police during a violent arrest. Another pal mysteriously shot in the head. His wife nearly dying during childbirth. Mother and baby left seriously ill. And, on top of all of that, being sexually abused by a “gangster” as a child.
Finally, thankfully, Abbott paused for breath and asked for a moment to compose himself. The stunned expressions on the faces of twelve jurors sitting opposite him across the courtroom told their own story.
Adam back now. Well, the judge jumped in at this point and asked him to just answer the questions put to him, in the dock at your own trial for murder isn’t the place for a monologue – all the relevant points will be raised by the barristers’ questions. And so the questioning began.
Abbot’s family were in court watching on so who knows what they made of his performance. He told one rambling story about what he reckoned happened to him at a beach in Wales. He said now that the man who abused him, who according to Abbot was a very powerful man, sent a man who he knew as Tony, known for carrying guns, to kill him while he walked by the sea with two female companions in 2012. Then a motorcyclist on a superbike arrived and stared at him, before they mysteriously drove away. I know we shouldn’t laugh about such an important matter, but just to finish his story about the mysterious Tony, Abbot told how he believed Tony had been sent to “silence” him, and moreover, get this, he was already on edge because three blackbirds had hit his car in the space of a month. I mean seriously. He kept going on about this Tony bloke, which finally ended when he later got a phone call saying he had been shot in the head, which left him with brain damage and “half a head to this day”. – the QC later referred to ‘Half a head Tony’.
Abbot then went on to tell how he turned to cocaine after his dad’s death in 2006 and this caused him “major psychosis”, including him firmly believing that he was in fact Jesus Christ in 2012. He then spoke about the day before the murder, when he had again takes cocaine, despite, in his words, he know it “sends me psychotic”. That night it made him think his girlfriend Danielle was trying to get him killed so fearing for his life, he spent the night at his mum’s house. But the next morning when he woke up there were lots of texts from Danielle as he had their house key. He told how she had managed to force entry into their home by going through a window, which meant the place was covered in blood. And she was so annoyed by him not answering her, Danielle had cut up his kickboxing gear, which was a real passion of Abbot’s. All of this, plus the wine and cocaine the night before meant that Abbott was, in his own words, a “nervous wreck” and “paranoid to death”, so this is when he started on the strong cider that morning.
And this is where ‘half a head’ Tony came into matters again. Abbot said whenever he was fearful, he would be taken back to that beach where he had the experience with Tony and so he would carry a knife to protect himself. This is why he took the knife with him before jumping into a taxi to take him to Christian’s pub, which he described as a ‘safe haven’ for him. And he now told the court something he omitted from all his police interviews, which is that he started to think that maybe Tony was again interfering in his life, and may have spoken to Christian and arranged for him to be barred from the pub.
He continued that it was not knowing why he was barred was driving him “insane” and as he thought he hadn’t done anything wrong, he just wanted to speak to Christian to ask why he had taken this action.
He reckoned that something snapped during his argument as he was so out of it. But that certainly didn’t match up with the evidence of the taxi driver who said he was talking to his estranged wife coherently on the phone and told the driver he was so angry about his PubWatch ban. When Christian showed Abbot he had called 999, Abbot reckoned this made his feel like his life was in danger from being shot by police officers as he was carrying a blade.
At cross-examination, Abbot had to admit he had never been sectioned or diagnosed with any mental illness, – including schizophrenia which you will recall he mentioned at his police interviews – despite his evidence suggesting that this was a huge aspect of his life. And when pressed, Abbot told the court how the attack on Christian was an “act of desperation” carried out by a “madman.” If that wasn’t bad enough, you can only imagine how Christian’s family felt as he continued that the murder was “a cry for help”. He added: “If I would have had a gun, I would have shot myself in the head. This was not down to me being a bad man, this was down to me needing help and being ill.” After listening to the evidence from Abbot, the prosecuting QC said, “If Lee Abbott was abused then that is a terrible thing. And no one should have to go through that. If he wasn’t abused, then it’s a terrible lie.
Following the nine-day trial, the jury took less than an hour and forty-five minutes to find Abbott guilty of murder. Despite his emotional rant earlier in the trial, on hearing the verdict, Abbot he showed no emotion. Passing a sentence of life in prison, with a minimum tariff of twenty-eight years, the Judge made the point that Abbott’s evidence had been “marked by narcissism… self-pity and deceit”.
Christian’s wife Pamela spoke about the effect of Christian’s death on her and her family saying: “I still cannot believe that Chris is no longer with us and I struggle with this daily. It absolutely breaks my heart knowing that I will never see him again. I’ve been unable to eat, drink and often felt physically ill. I’ve lost my partner, my best friend and father to my children and all as a result of an act of senseless violence. “Chris was an amazing person, he was very sociable, he was funny, kind and would do anything for anyone. My family have lost a loving husband and father. Initially when I was dealing with the loss of Chris, I felt like my life wasn’t worth living as the love of my life had been so cruelly taken from me. However, we have three wonderful children, and they are the reason I have to get up each morning and make it through the day. When our children were born Chris was absolutely over the moon. He loved all of his children so much and was an absolutely amazing father. It breaks my heart to think that Chris will not be stood by my side at milestone events such as the children’s special birthdays, their marriages and the birth of our grandchildren.” She spoke about how losing their dad had affected their children: “Prior to Chris’ death, our son was a chatty outgoing young man who absolutely adored watching and playing rugby. However, he’s changed, he’s very quiet, withdrawn and doesn’t tend to speak to people. He like many teenage boys loves online gaming – I’d often hear him chatting to his friends online – but this does not happen often now. He has also stopped playing rugby”. She continued that their eldest daughter, who has just started university, was just keeping super busy to try her best to cope with losing her dad. Their youngest daughter wouldn’t talk about her dad’s death and was undergoing counselling.
So, what do you make of what we have heard today?
We have all seen someone like Abbot at the pub right? Clearly out of it on something – loud, aggressive and not the brightest. And from this podcast we have heard how little it takes for someone like this to kick off and start serious violence. But today, what else could Christian have done? He did everything that a responsible pub landlord should do to protect his customers from a loose cannon like Abbot. How could he ever have known that Abbot would react with such extreme violence.
I have chosen not to watch the cctv of Abbot attacking Christian or his arrogant bravado when he was arrested, but I can only imagine how his family and friends must have felt seeing that in court. And of course, his young son and wife saw him straight after the attack. You won’t be surprised to know that following the murder, there was such an outpouring of grief locally for such a pointless murder of such a popular man. I think today there is little else to say except that our thoughts and love and with Christian’s wife Pamela, his children and everyone else who was in his life – their loss is…well…hard to comprehend.
This story was first covered in episode 428 of the UK True Crime Podcast, using the following sources:
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/judge-slams-cowardly-killer-tells-17792253
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/three-childrens-lives-torn-apart-17789952
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/mystery-gangster-half-head-tony-17798652
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-51576386
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-51587101
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/R-v-Lee-Abbott-NOTE-FOR-SENTENCE.pdf
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/pub-landlord-murderers-haunting-first-17783064