A child killer has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 15 years for the 1994 murder of six-year-old Rikki Neave.
James Watson was 13 years old when he lured schoolboy Rikki to the woods near his Peterborough home and strangled him to fulfill a ‘morbid fantasy’ he had told his mother about three days previously.
He stripped Rikki naked and positioned his naked body in a star form for sexual gratification, ‘exhibiting’ him near a children’s woodland den.
His sentencing was heavily influenced by his age at the time he hit.
The judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, said: ‘Rikki was a child too willing to trust and engage with strangers.
‘He never had the chance to be happy and lead a normal and fulfilling life. That opportunity was denied to him by his murder.’
Watson remained emotionless as he was sentenced.
The judge stated that he would only be released after serving the minimum term of 15 years – minus the two years and four months already served on remand – and after the Parole Board determined that he no longer posed a risk to the public.
Rikki’s murder was one of the most high-profile cold cases in police files until Watson’s DNA was discovered on the victim’s clothes during a re-investigation two decades later.
Mother-of-four Ruth Neave was acquitted of her son’s murder in 1996, but was sentenced to seven years in prison for child cruelty – a conviction she is said to be considering appealing several years later.
She did not attend court for the sentencing hearing.
In a witness statement, read on her behalf, she said: ‘Like stones dropping in a pond, it (the murder) has rippled out far and wide.
‘Rikki’s murder left a massive hole in our lives and in our hearts. I miss him so much that it feels like I have had my heart ripped out.’
Rebecca Maria Harvey, Rikki’s eldest sister, broke down as she addressed the court.
She said: ‘Although I was the eldest, it wasn’t like that as he would look after me. Losing Rikki was like losing the other half of me.’
Addressing Watson, but not using his name, she said: ‘After all these years of living your life you finally get your comeuppance, and Rikki Lee Harvey finally gets justice.’
Mrs Justice McGowan added: ‘Rikki’s body was found by a police officer in the woods.
‘After his death he was stripped naked and the body was laid out on the ground spreadeagled.
‘A button was missing from his school uniform shirt. A matching button was found on a leaf near the body, showing clearly that he had been undressed at that location.
‘Rikki was only six years old.’
She went on to say that Rikki’s childhood was a sad one and that on occasions he was subject to ‘cruel behaviour’.
Watson also had a difficult childhood, she continued.
‘I cannot be sure that the two boys ever met before the time around the date of the killing.
‘I am sure that in the period before the murder James Watson was thinking about, planning and even talking about the placing of a naked body of a strangled child in those woods.
‘I am also sure at the time that James Watson had a sexual interest in little boys.
‘The account given in 1993 by a young boy to his mother about a sexual assault demonstrates that clearly.
‘I am equally sure that a warped interest in strangulation in sexual activity is demonstrates in the evidence of a teenage girlfriend of James Watson.’
The judge said there was no sexual activity directly linked to Rikki, but that the stripping and posing of the body pointed to a sexual interest.
‘The bizarre stripping…was undoubtedly seen as a manifestation of that sexual interest.’
She spoke of how Watson changed his account over the years in anticipation of new DNA evidence.
Watson, now 41, was found guilty of murder in April by a jury who deliberated for 36 hours and 31 minutes to reach a majority verdict after an 11-week trial.
Rikki’s body was found on November 29 1994, the day after he went missing.
Watson had obsessed over newspaper coverage of the killing, copying front page stories at school.
The next month he was interviewed as a witness by police after an elderly resident reported seeing him with Rikki on the nearby Welland Estate.
His lying account was unchallenged, as police wrongly focused on a theory that Ms Neave killed her son and used a buggy to dump his body.
Prosecutors initially felt there was still insufficient evidence to prosecute, but reversed their decision after Ms Neave and Rikki’s sisters called for a victims’ right to review.
Key evidence included Rikki’s last meal, of Weetabix, which fixed his time of death at about noon.
It meant Rikki was killed shortly after being seen with Watson heading to the woods where he used to play.
Rikki’s muddy Clarks shoes also hinted at a one-way trek into the woods.
Watson’s sexual interest in younger boys was known to police, who interviewed him in 1993 in connection with an allegation that he molested a five-year-old.
In a horrific reconstruction of Rikki’s death, an ex-girlfriend later said he strangled her during sex in the woods, killed a bird, and spread its wings.
The judge found no proof of sexual behavior with Rikki’s body, despite Watson’s “sexual interest in little boys.”
Watson claimed in a police interview in 2016 that he picked up Rikki to look at diggers through a hole in a fence.
Watson, who has a long criminal record, including convictions for car theft, fled to Portugal while on bail on suspicion of murder, but was extradited back to Britain.
Clare Forsdike, a senior crown prosecutor at the CPS, said: ‘The life sentence given to James Watson today brings to an end the horrific case of the murder of six-year-old Rikki Neave in 1994.
‘I am very proud of the hard work done by the Crown Prosecution Service and Cambridgeshire Police to catch and prosecute James Watson, who has never accepted responsibility for what he did.
‘Rikki’s family continue to live with his tragic loss and all our thoughts remain with them.’
The horrific murder sparked national outrage at the time, less than two years after the abduction, torture and brutal killing of two-year-old James Bulger in Merseyside.
Watson’s web of lies and constantly changing alibis which helped him evade justice for 28 years mean much about the murder still remains unclear – including whether he knew Rikki prior to the killing.
However jury members heard how Watson’s DNA was found on adhesive tapings on Rikki’s clothes, and that Watson’s posing of the six-year-old’s naked body was an act carried out for his own sexual gratification.
The decision also came 26 years after Rikki’s mother Ruth Neave was cleared of her son’s murder by a jury at Northampton Crown Court following a high-profile 16-day trial
She later admitted child cruelty in relation to a number of incidents throughout Rikki’s short life, including grabbing Rikki around the throat, pushing him against a wall and lifting him up.
Ms Neave was jailed for seven years in October 1996. After Watson’s guilty verdict, she described her son’s murderer as a ‘monster’.
In a statement following the verdict, Ms Neave said: ‘The only thing now is to close this chapter in my life and open a new one.
‘I wonder what Rikki would be like today, married, children? Who knows?
‘But this monster has taken that all from me and my daughters.’
She praised jurors for making the ‘right decision’ and thanked ‘people that believed in me and Rikki’.
Ms Neave was jailed for seven years in October 1996. Speaking after the verdict, she described her son’s murderer as a ‘monster’.
Watson’s barrister Jenni Dempster insisted that the murder was ‘not planned and not sexually motivated.’
Speaking outside court, former assistant chief constable Paul Fullwood, who led the cold case inquiry, said: ‘It has taken a significant period of time to get to this point but we made a promise that we would find the person responsible for Rikki’s death and it is a promise that we have kept.
‘Rikki was a six-year-old little boy. He was a kind and cheeky chap who was cruelly taken under the most horrendous of circumstances.
‘His memory lives on through his family who have to deal with his loss for the rest of their lives. But now they finally know. They know what happened. We really really hope this gives them some peace.
‘For years James Watson had hidden away knowing he was responsible for Rikki’s murder and thinking he had gotten away with it.
‘But this is no longer the case. He will spend years behind bars and the truth has finally come out.’
Asked about the original investigation into Ruth Neave, Mr Fullwood said Cambridgeshire Constabulary led a ‘tunnel vision investigation’.
‘Absolutely they charged the wrong person.’
He added that the original investigation occurred shortly after the Jamie Bulger murder and that the constabulary were under a lot of pressure. Mr Fullwood has personally apologised to Ms Neave.
Asked if he believed Watson had ever shown any remorse, he said: ‘I have seen someone who was a fantasist, a compulsive liar and a sexual predator.
‘I have not seen any evidence of James Watson showing any remorse for the dreadful, dreadful murder of Rikki Neave.’
At the Old Bailey, the jury heard how Watson was detained after a new investigation into the case revealed a “definitive match” between his DNA profile and samples obtained from Rikki’s clothing.
Rikki’s murder remained unsolved for a further 20 years following Ms Neave’s 1996 conviction for child abuse, until fresh evidence was discovered in 2015.
In June 2016, Watson boarded a ship at Dover to leave the UK. Two months later, he agreed to be extradited from Portugal.
In the three-month-long trial at the Old Bailey in London, the jury heard how Watson strangled the younger kid by squeezing his throat with the collar of Rikki’s blue anorak from behind him for at least 30 seconds.
They were also informed that Watson, a convicted arsonist with “morbid fantasies” and a “sexual interest” in young children, had throttled his girlfriend during sex and assaulted a five-year-old child a year before to the murder.