TRACIE Andrews took the witness stand yesterday to defend herself against charges that she murdered Lee Harvey, the fiancée she had planned to marry this week.
Speaking in a quiet voice with little trace of emotion, she gave a graphic account of the jealous rows, violent outbursts, splits and reconciliations which characterised their two-year courtship. But she told the jury of nine women and three men that she had never stopped loving Mr Harvey and blamed the trauma of the night he was stabbed to death for the fact that she remembers those incidents only “as though in a dream”.
Asked by Ronald Thwaites, QC, defending, why she attempted suicide after his death, she said: “I felt I had no future life. I loved Lee more than anything in the world. I didn't want to live without him.”
Leaving the glass-screened dock at Birmingham Crown Court to take the stand, Andrews passed within feet of Mr Harvey's family and parents, Ray and Maureen, who have sat at the front of the public gallery daily since the trial began two weeks ago. Ignoring their stares, she stepped into the witness box, screwing and unscrewing a tissue in her clasped hands, as she faced a series of questions from Mr Thwaites.
“Did you kill Lee Harvey?” “No I did not.” “Did you want him dead?” “No I did not.” “From the time your relationship began to the day he died, did you want any other man?” “No, never.” “Were you faithful or unfaithful to him?” “I was faithful to him.”
Andrews, 38, from Alvechurch, Hereford and Worcester, denies murdering Mr Harvey, 25, an unemployed bus driver, and says his killer was an unidentified motorist who pursued their car in a road rage-style altercation. Describing the incident, on Dec 1 last year, she told the court how, after the two cars stopped, she had pleaded with Mr Harvey to forget his anger and remain in the car. But both drivers got out to argue, she said. “I heard Lee say, ‘What's the problem? Do you think you're Nigel Mansell’? There was swearing and prodding with fingers.”
Then she saw the passenger get out of the car and attack Mr Harvey. She tried to intervene and was punched in the face, she said. Mr Harvey was lying on the road, propped on his elbows. He was mortally wounded by multiple stab wounds but Andrews said she did not realise it.
“I went straight over to Lee. I took my coat off and put it over him. I knelt down and put my arms under his head and I was cuddling him. I got up a few times. I went over towards the car. I went towards a house. I didn't know what to do.
“It was as though it was in a dream. I can only remember certain things. I remember asking, ‘Why can't I cry’? I can remember saying, ‘Only 25 minutes ago we were in the pub’. But I can't recall conversations.”
Cross-examined by David Crigman, QC, prosecuting, she said that was why she was uncertain about the route she and Mr Harvey had taken on the night - a fact that Mr Crigman dismissed as “incredible”. He suggested the pursuing car with the “mad, road-raged motorist” at the wheel was a “phantom” of her imagination and that she had killed her fiance herself after a row.
“Your relationship was always on the edge of some kind of explosion, wasn't it?” he asked. “No,” she replied. “You only needed a few weeks together before there would be an eruption of some kind. That was the pattern of your relationship for many months,” Mr Crigman said. “We did have a lot of ups and downs,” Andrews said.
Her defending counsel took her, step by step, through her earlier years and the life she led after she met Mr Harvey in October, 1994. They were immediately attracted to each other and Mr Harvey mentioned marriage early on. “It was the second day I met him,” she said. “He told his mother and sister that he had met the girl he wanted to marry.”
Asked by Mr Thwaites if she had “fallen into the same trap”, she shook her head and said: “No.” But after a while he moved into her flat. Both she and Mr Harvey had children by previous relationships. She said it was his inability to come to terms with this which usually led to their rows. Both had tempers and he was particularly insecure and jealous. “I loved his little girl as if she was my own,” she said and chronicled events in a relationship punctuated by domestic arguments, scenes in public places and loving interludes.
The worst argument was when she was pregnant by Mr Harvey. She decided to terminate the baby at 16 weeks because she did not wish to be a single mother with two children by different men. On at least six occasions the couple broke up but each time they made up after a few weeks with pledges to start afresh. They planned to marry last August but postponed it after another row, rearranging it for July 19 this year.
Andrews insisted that the weekend Mr Harvey died had been a relatively happy one with nothing worse than the odd tiff. Neighbours who had heard noisy arguments were mistaken, she said. She regularly wore four rings, three on her right hand but only one on her left - the engagement ring given to her by Mr Harvey. She wore it in court and walked along the jury bench to display both hands. Mr Thwaites urged the jurors to note the rings and the size of her hands.
The jurors were also shown an Identikit-style image, prepared with Andrews's help, of the man she said committed the murder. It was a “60 to 70 per cent likeness,” she said, adding that the police had not asked her to try to identify anyone through their photographic “rogue's gallery”. Asked if she could explain why strands of her hair were found clutched in the dead man's hand, she said it frequently falls out, and blamed over-use of dye to keep it blonde.
The trial continues.