Michael Doherty admitted murdering Courtney Angus at Leeds Crown Court and was jailed for life with a minimum term of 33 years, closing a case that exposed a killing marked by sexual violence, mutilation and a chilling attempt to hide what he had done. Angus, 21, was attacked at Doherty’s home in Norfolk Street, Batley, after moving in only days earlier as a lodger.

The court heard Doherty strangled Angus after she rejected his advances at the house they shared on 25 July last year. A pathologist found she died from pressure on the neck caused by strangling, combined with head injuries from blunt force trauma, and she suffered 76 injuries in total during the attack. Parts of her body were cut off and left on his mantelpiece, while Doherty also used his phone to take indecent images of her after her death.

What made the case even more disturbing was the sequence that followed. After taking the images, Doherty sent a message to a friend saying, “I've killed someone, ring me please.” He then told police where to find her body only after he had been detained the next day for brandishing a knife after stealing from a supermarket. At 21:15 BST, staff at an Asda store in Dewsbury followed him after he left without paying and produced a large knife, before officers later found him in Dewsbury town centre with the weapon.

Before the killing, prosecutor Craig Hassall said Doherty texted Angus threatening to kill himself on the day of the murder, and Angus replied that she did not want a relationship and had not led him on. The message made clear she was not his partner and did not want one. The evidence heard by the court was that shortly before her death she had rejected the offender’s advances towards some sort of intimate relationship.

Doherty, who changed his name from Michael Moore in 2018, also had previous convictions for raping a stranger on her way home from a nightclub and for torching a former partner’s car. That history framed the court’s view of his violence toward women who refused him, but the focus of the case remained the same: Angus was killed after saying no, and the manner of her death was as brutal as it was deliberate.

The unanswered question at the center of the case was never who killed Courtney Angus. Doherty admitted that in open court. What the sentence makes clear is the scale of the violence and the court’s response to it: a life term with at least 33 years before parole, for a murder that began with rejection and ended with a young woman’s body being abused after death.