A student allegedly murdered in her university halls by her ‘sexually obsessed’ stepdad ‘paid’ with her life for ‘daring to say no’, jurors have been told.
Nathan Owens, 34, is said to have strangled Carla Georgescu with a leather belt after driving more than 100 miles through the night to her accommodation in Preston on February 4.
Jurors have heard he harboured an ‘escalating fascination’ with the 19-year-old clinical psychology student, including filming himself having sex with an ‘effigy’ adorned with Carla’s nightdress.
It culminated in a fatal sex attack when he learned Carla was due to fly out to Romania the next day and was planning to meet a new boyfriend, Preston Crown Court has heard.
Owens, who denies murder, offered no defense case when the prosecution evidence concluded this week.
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The judge, Mr Justice Jacobs, asked Owens’s barrister if he had been told jurors could ‘draw such inferences as appear proper’ from his ‘failure’ to give evidence.
John Elvidge KC confirmed Owens had been so advised.
Summing up the prosecution case in his closing speech to the jury, Nicholas Lumley KC said Owens made the long drive that night because ‘he knew that was the last chance to catch her’ before she flew to Romania the next day.
He was determined ‘to satisfy his sexual needs, come what may’, Mr Lumley said.
Owens listened from the dock as the prosecutor told jurors only one person knows what happened in Carla’s flat that night and he is ‘in this room’.
Addressing questions to Owens, Mr Lumley asked whether he had treated Carla ‘like a doll, like one of your effigies’ and then killed her because she ‘dared to say no’.
‘Did she pay for that?’ he added.
Mr Lumley suggested the belt may have been tied around Carla’s neck to make her death appear to have been a suicide.
But he reminded jurors that the teenager wrote and drew extensively to express her emotions and yet apparently left no note behind.
‘It’s almost as if being strangled to death wasn’t quite her idea,’ he said.
Of Owens’s decision not to step into the witness box and be cross-examined, the Mr Lumley said: ‘It’s his right to sit there and for the prosecution to prove his guilt.
‘Well, we have.’
Jurors have heard Owens was ‘sexually fixated’ on Carla and her death was the culmination of an escalating ‘one-sided sexual obsession’.
Owens secretly took hundreds of photos of Carla carrying out household jobs dressed in pyjamas or underwear and a vest top, the court has been told.
He is also said to have created so-called deepfake pornographic images of her and filmed himself having sex with an effigy dressed in her nightwear.
Owens denies murder, strangulation and GBH.
The trial continues.
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