Bourne told a 999 operator: ‘I’m a nice boy from Chelsea. You’re just going to have to please not bring a gun. I do have blood all over me’. The son of a wealthy art collector repeatedly stabbed and then strangled a live-in housekeeper at his family’s multimillion-pound home in west London, telling her during the attack that she was evil, a court has heard.
Maximillian Bourne was charged with the attempted murder of Joselia Pereira Do Nascimento at the luxury property in Justice Walk, Chelsea, on February 25 last year. The 26-year-old was said to have called 999 afterwards, telling the operator he had stabbed a “demon woman” and that he was a “nice boy from Chelsea”, a court heard.
Bourne was deemed unfit to stand trial because of his mental health, and a jury will decide whether he did the act alleged against him, rather than if he is guilty or not guilty. Jurors at Southwark Crown Court heard on Monday that Bourne and Ms Nascimento had been the only two people living in the house for around three months before the incident, with Bourne’s mother travelling abroad.
In a statement read out by the prosecutor, Ms Nascimento said Bourne knocked on her door on the evening of February 25 last year asking her to come outside. “He started to attack me with a knife and he didn’t say anything,” she alleged. “He was holding me by the blouse and he started stabbing my blouse. I was bleeding so much that I was using the blouse to stop the bleeding.
“When he was stabbing me he eventually let go of the knife and started to strangle me around the neck with both hands.”. Ms Nascimento described how she managed to get free and lock herself in a bathroom before retrieving her phone to call for help, telling one of her friends that she was dying.
The court heard she tried to breathe quietly in the hope that Bourne would think she was dead. “He then said: ‘Open the door’, which he repeated and was knocking,” Ms Nascimento continued. “I could feel my blood going down my body. I was losing blood.”.
Describing the alleged stabbing, she said: “I told him I have a daughter and I pleaded with him to stop. “He told me that it was because I was evil, but we had never had an argument or a disagreement.”. She said he had not been behaving normally in the lead-up to the incident, recounting how he had been sleeping on the bathroom floor and talking to himself, the court heard.
Jurors heard Bourne made a 999 call after the event, giving his name and telling the operator: “There is this demon woman in my house and I stabbed her. “I’m a nice boy from Chelsea. You’re just going to have to please not bring a gun. I do have blood all over me.”.
Judge Gregory Perrins explained to jurors ahead of the prosecution opening that Bourne is not fit to stand trial because he is “mentally very unwell”. “He will not be present during the course of this trial,” he said. “There cannot be a trial in the usual way that you would normally understand and you will not be asked to return verdicts of guilty or not guilty as you would in a normal criminal trial.
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