The bar was almost empty when Julia walked in. She’d missed her bus and ended up in Dudley instead of Birmingham, but it didn’t bother her. She knew people here. Elaine had gone home hours ago, tired after their day out.
Julia had texted friends, made plans, laughed at nothing. Then she saw the man sitting alone at the bar and did what she always did. She walked over, smiled, and talked to him like he was an old friend. Two in the morning.
Last call. She left with him. Nobody knows what she saw when she stepped into his apartment. The wall-mounted spiders, the masks, the knives.
The bookshelf packed with crime novels. The Chucky doll shrine. Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn’t get the chance to react.
They killed her, cut her into eleven pieces, and scattered her in the canal. The first remains weren’t found until July. “She was like a big kid,” Debbie said. “It was like she never grew up.
Everything was just, ‘wow, look at that. ’ She was really full of life. ”
Julia Rosson was a tall woman with black shaggy hair and paint permanently smudged on her face. She dressed like a rock star and told her friends, “A happy child is a mucky child.
” She loved daffodils, and she ran a stall at the local market selling candles, incense, and her own artwork. She and Elaine had been together since college. Her family called her the sunshine that walked into a room and made everything brighter. Steve remembered her grabbing his girlfriend and screaming, “You smell like coconuts!
” because she worked at Lush. Norma’s daughter Charlotte said Julia gave her the push she needed to start her business. Norma said, if you asked Julia if your bum looked big in this, she’d tell you yes if it did. But she was also the one who helped Charlotte set up a room upstairs in the shop when Charlotte was recovering from a terrible illness.
Julia was 6 feet tall, 40 years old, and everybody knew her name. When she went missing, her friends and family walked every route she could have taken. They called hospitals, checked pubs, posted flyers. Debby felt the pit of her stomach drop when she heard the news.
She kept hoping Julia had stayed at a friend’s house and her phone had died. Five days after the disappearance, police got footage of a woman matching Julia’s description talking to a man in the Bottle and Cork pub in Dudley. She was still responding to calls and texts from friends and family until late that night. Then she went quiet.
Five days later, Nathan Maynard Ellis and David Leasely were arrested. They were a couple. Nathan was 30, on his birthday, when police took him in. David was 26.
They had lived together for years, decorated their apartment with horror props, and kept reptiles in tanks. They had a shrine to Chucky from the Child’s Play films, and a copy of a book called “A History of British Serial Killing” by David Wilson. When police searched the apartment, they pulled back a newly placed carpet and found a blood stain. Security footage showed the couple bringing a bloodstained chair and bags of clothing with Julia’s DNA to a waste facility.
A neighbor described their apartment as “the making of horror stories. ”
It wasn’t until June that Julia’s remains were found in the Tipton Canal. Some parts were discovered on the 12th, others on the 29th, scattered in two different places. Her head, hands, and feet had been amputated.
For a while nobody even knew if the remains were Julia’s. Then dental records and DNA testing confirmed what they all feared. The woman who walked into a bar and made a lonely stranger feel seen was dead. Elaine couldn’t get out of bed for days.
The Strokes concert she and Julia had bought tickets for months ago came and went. Elaine said, “They killed a part of me, too. Not a day goes by when I’m not thinking about her. She was my world.
”
Nathan and David both pleaded not guilty. Nathan said he didn’t mean to kill Julia. He claimed she was flirting with him, got too close for comfort, and he hit her with a rolling pin. He said he was only interested in serial killers from an educational perspective.
David blamed Nathan. He told a psychiatrist he knew about his partner’s fantasies but had no part in making them real. But the evidence told a different story. Security footage showed Nathan’s tattoos matching the man on the CCTV.
And after the arrests, an anonymous woman reported that Nathan had followed her, threatened to kill her, and hide her body. Police found she wasn’t the only one. He was charged with four counts of assault, one count of attempted assault, and threats to kill. The trial began in March.
The prosecutor told the jury that Julia couldn’t have known she was walking into “a flat of horrors” but she must have realized it very soon after she went in. He described Nathan as someone who had been “addicted to thoughts of the violent sexualized killing of women” for years. On November 9th, 2020, Nathan Maynard Ellis and David Leasely were both found guilty of murder. Justice Michael Su gave Nathan a life sentence with a minimum term of 30 years, and David 19 years.
The judge told them: “Only you two know just what happened in the flat, but neither has told the truth. You were fascinated by films involving extreme violence, serial killers, necrophilia, and extending to cannibalism. You fantasized about killing someone, including by strangulation. ”
The judge said Nathan was the leader, but David gave him “unquestioning support.
”
When Julia’s remains were finally released, her family held her funeral in April 2020, during the pandemic. Her friends couldn’t mourn together in person. Instead, they lit candles at 11 in the morning. Debbie wrote a poem and posted it on Facebook.
“It’s not goodbye. It could never be the end. It’s just a temporary parting, so take care, my dear friend. ”
Years later, criminologist David Wilson saw the photographs of the apartment in the news.
He recognized the spine of his own book on their shelf. He said, “They had my books on their bookshelf. You know, you’re kind of like, wait a minute, this is just getting a bit too strange. ”
He realized Nathan and David had copied some of Jack the Ripper’s methods.
David Wilson felt guilty for a time, but he knew the difference between someone with a normal interest and someone already carrying violent fantasies. The doctor who spoke with Nathan while he awaited trial said Nathan told him he did not intend to murder Julia, that it was an accident. But the jury didn’t believe it. And the judge called it the “culmination of years of pent-up fantasy and desire.
”
Julia’s friends still look for her in the stars and the moon, among the daffodils, and in the shiny things she loved. Debbie bought a small garden statue of a fairy on a swing. They named her Dinky Daffodil, in memory of the woman who was sunshine. Elaine said, “I loved her in colors that don’t exist.
And now it’s the same how much I miss her. ”
Nathan and David are both serving their sentences. The solicitor general tried to extend their minimum terms, but the appeal was dismissed. It’s possible they will both die in prison.
Julia Rosson was a woman who painted with her hands and laughed with her whole body. She had a huge cheeky grin that made it impossible not to laugh when you were with her. She was beautifully human.
And she deserved so much more than what happened to her.
