Chilling CCTV footage shows a dad-of-six clutching at his chest after his abusive ex-partner stabbed him in the heart on Christmas Day.
Kirsty Carless, 33, will be jailed for life later today for murdering 31-year-old Louis Price during an attack ‘motivated by anger and jealousy and fuelled by cocaine and alcohol’ after seeing his Tinder profile.
She tried to claim she wasn’t a violent person during her trial but jurors at Stafford Crown Court were told Mr Price was considered by police to be ‘at very high risk of domestic abuse’ before his death.
They were shown separate footage of him sobbing to police officers after he called 999 to report another attack by Carless just weeks earlier, saying: ‘It’s f****** embarrassing… it can’t keep happening, man.’
In a witness statement after the incident, Mr Price said the relationship, which started in 2021, had been ‘on the whole, abusive’, that she had stopped him doing things he liked, such as playing football and had physically abused him.
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His friend, Demi-Louise Deakin, told jurors he had confided in her that he was ‘scared of Kirsty’ and feared ‘something bad would happen’ if he did not leave her.
The court heard Carless messaged Mr Price the day before his death on December 25 last year saying: ‘I hate u… I wish you was dead.’
She spent that evening at the pub drinking double vodka and cokes with a male friend before going back to his home and having sex.
But prosecutor Jonas Hankin KC told jurors ‘things changed’ when a friend sent her a screenshot of Mr Price’s Tinder profile.
Carless then left the male friend’s home, took a taxi back to her house, where she picked up a kitchen knife and got another taxi to Mr Price’s parents’ address in Elm Road, Norton Canes, where she expected to find him with a woman.
Mr Price’s relatives wept at CCTV showing her running up the front path into the house and then ‘stalking’ him around the garden.
He was later found with a single stab wound to the chest on the conservatory floor.
Carless had called Mr Price 45 times between 2.15am and 2.44am while she waited for the taxi to take her to the address where he had been staying since their relationship ended.
The only break in what Mr Hankin called the ‘barrage’ of calls was when she rang the cab firm to check where her taxi was.
After arriving at the address, Carless asked the taxi driver to wait outside while she went into the property to stab Mr Price at around 3am.
The taxi driver reported that around 30 seconds after Carless let herself into the property with a key, he heard a ‘very loud and prolonged’ scream from a man and that he ‘sounded scared’.
Less than two minutes after arriving at the scene, Carless was ‘anxious and sweating’ as she got back into the taxi and demanded the driver take her to her parents’ home, where she admitted what she had done and 999 was called.
‘The evidence shows, the prosecution say, that Kirsty Carless was manipulative, emotionally volatile and jealous,’ Mr Hankin said.
‘Her harmful use of alcohol and cocaine worsened her behaviour, and the effects of intoxication intensified the negative traits of her personality.’
Carless was found guilty of murder and possession of an offensive weapon by the jury of seven men and five women after around a day of deliberation on Wednesday.
She was also found guilty of assault occasioning actual bodily harm by a majority of 11 to one in connection with an incident in November 2024.
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