Man told friend he was scared of ex accused of stabbing him to death
Kirsty Carless, 33, is accused of plunging a knife into 31-year-old Louis Price's heart in the early hours of December 25 2024 in an attack 'motivated by anger and jealousy and fuelled by cocaine and alcohol' after a friend sent her a picture of his dating profile on Tinder, Stafford Crown Court heard.
Prosecutors allege Carless, of Haling Way in Cannock, Staffordshire, took a kitchen knife in a taxi from her home to Mr Price's parents' address in Elm Road, Norton Canes, where she expected to find him with a woman.
CCTV showed Carless 'stalking' him around the garden before he was later found with a single stab wound to the chest on the conservatory floor.
The court was told Mr Price was considered by police to be 'at very high risk of domestic abuse' before his death.
Giving evidence on the second day of the trial, friend Demi-Louise Deakin said Mr Price had confided in her about his on-off relationship with Carless when they attended a funeral at the end of November 2024.
Asked by prosecution counsel Jonas Hankin KC what Mr Price had said, Miss Deakin said: 'He said he was scared of Kirsty and if he didn't leave soon something bad would happen to him…
'He said she can be violent towards him.'
Miss Deakin, who lived near the defendant, said she also witnessed another incident where Carless allegedly poured bleach over his clothes and threw a shoe out of the window which hit him on the head.
Another neighbour also told the court she had called the police on another occasion after witnessing Carless chasing and hitting Mr Price in the ribs with a metal pole outside the house while he had his arms up protecting his head.
Jurors were shown police body-worn video footage from when officers attended Carless' address on November 11 2024, after Mr Price phoned 999 to say she had poured bleach over tracksuits worth £400, had thrown a glass candle holder at him, pulled him down the stairs and choked him.
As he was moved away from the house by one of the officers, Mr Price appeared to become emotional, saying: 'It's f****** embarrassing … it can't keep happening, man.'
In a witness statement after the incident, he said the relationship 'on the whole, has been abusive'.
He said: 'She has constantly been abusive towards me, stopped me doing things I enjoy like football, and physically abused me.'
He added: 'She has abused me for years now yet I'm always the one that gets arrested.'
The trial was told of several previous incidents in which the police had been called, including an incident on March 5 2023 in which Carless had said Mr Price had punched her and been violent and he was arrested.
Carless retracted her statement in July that year, telling police: 'It was 50/50 and we hit each other, I hurt him as much as he hurt me, I felt so pressured to make it sound one-sided by my social worker at the time.
'It is wrong what I said in my original statement, I don't want to go to court and lie about what happened.'
In another incident on September 26 2023, Carless called police to say her partner had hit her before the call ended and later claimed a neighbour had stolen her phone and pretended to be her when officers traced her.
The court was also told Carless admitted to police she had made up allegations that Mr Price had grabbed her by the throat three times after she confronted him about messages on his phone in November 2023, telling officers it was a 'way of getting back at him for speaking to other women'.
Carless denies murder and possessing an offensive weapon in a public place in relation to the fatal incident on December 25 2024 and one count of intentional strangulation and one count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm in relation to the incident on November 11 2024.
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