The Murder of Lucy McHugh

Stephen Nicholson, 25, stabbed Lucy McHugh just 13 at the time of her death, 27 times at Southampton Outdoor Sports Centre in July 2018. He was found guilty of murder and three charges of raping Lucy after a trial at Winchester Crown Court and was ordered to spend at least 33 years in jail. Judge Mrs Justice May said Lucy had "unknown promise, cruelly obliterated" and described Nicholson as "depraved".

The judge told Nicholson: "This was a pitiless attack on a child following months of sexual exploitation". The trial heard that Nicholson first raped Lucy, then aged 12, in May 2017 while living at her home, and on two further occasions over the following week.

Nicholson had later decided Lucy had "become a serious object to his comfortable life and there was a real threat of her outing him as a paedophile". The judge said teachers had "done the right thing" in raising concerns to social services but no action was taken.

She added: "The [social services] team had investigated and had found nothing to concern them. The obvious question is, 'how could social services have arrived at that conclusion, not once but twice?'".

Nicholson was also found guilty of sexual activity with another girl, aged 14, in 2012. Victim impact statements from Lucy's mother and father were submitted to the court. The court heard Nicholson had previously been detained in 2009 for taking staff and residents of a Southampton children's home hostage when he was aged 14.

In an interview, Nicholson told detectives Lucy had sent him a Facebook message the night before she was murdered. She told him she was pregnant, he said. This gave officers a reason to look more closely at messages sent between the teenager and a man 11 years her senior.
They soon realised Nicholson had changed his password prior to his arrest. He refused to hand it over, denying police access to whatever information may have been contained within his account.

Nicholson, a cannabis dealer, said he withheld his password to avoid reprisals from his criminal contacts - an excuse later branded "wholly inadequate" by a judge. Locked out of his Facebook account and with no direct evidence linking him to Lucy's death, police needed more time.
A request to the social media giant would involve a longer route through the US courts - well in excess of the 96 hours available to detectives.

The answer was so-called "terrorism legislation", or section 53 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Normally used in cases involving national security, the surveillance law can cover all serious crimes.

Nicholson was bailed in relation to Lucy's murder but charged under RIPA for failing to comply with an order to hand over his password.

There was nothing to physically link the spot where Lucy's body was found to Nicholson - the murder weapon remained unaccounted for and no DNA was found at the scene. Once again, investigators focused on Nicholson's online accounts, this time enlisting the help of a cloud data analyst.

Their job was to study pieces of information sent from Nicholson's phone to data servers owned by companies such as Google. While tracing the phone's route on the day of Lucy's murder, the analyst noticed a small "blip" at an area police had not yet searched. It suggested Nicholson had deviated from his most direct route home.

The diversion took him to Tanner's Brook: a stream which cuts through Southampton, weaving its way through woodland in the western half of the city. It was a slight deviation on his telephone. You could say it had jumped a mast.

Detectives established that hoodies of the same type were sold to two people in the Southampton area - one of them was given as a present to a man who knew Nicholson's friend.
The DNA evidence was "the final nail in the coffin" for Nicholson.

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