She shouted up the stairs, “Slers,” the way she always did. See you later. Love you. Bye.
It was the last thing Natalie Jarvis ever said to her mother. Thirty minutes later, a driver found her face down on the pavement in a quiet village lane. She had been stabbed more than twenty times in the neck. Her phone had been thrown over a hedge so she couldn’t call for help.
The man who killed her was Adam Wheeleran. They weren’t enemies. They weren’t even officially dating. They were in what people now call a situationship.
But Adam had been planning her death for weeks. And his friends had been encouraging him the whole time. Natalie Jarvis met Adam Wheeleran in 2008 at a local pub, but they were both in other relationships. Nothing happened.
Four years later, in the summer of 2012, she noticed on Facebook that he was single. She reached out. He reached back. She was twenty-three, living with her parents, Adele and Mark, in Swanley, Kent.
She worked at McDonald’s and loved it. She was loud, bubbly, and fun. When she walked into a room, the noise level went up. People flocked to her.
Her mother asked her several times if Adam was her boyfriend. Natalie would say, “Mom, no. He’s just a friend. We’re just friends.
” But her mother knew there was more to it. She knew they were intimate. Natalie’s family never really got to know Adam. He never came to the door.
He would pick her up from the house, take her to the cinema, take her out to eat. They would go to his place. But he never came inside to meet her parents. “I don’t really know a lot about Adam at all,” Adele would later say.
“One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t know anything about him. Because if I had, maybe I could have warned her. ”
What Natalie didn’t know was how Adam and his friends talked about her when she wasn’t around. They called her JC.
It was a cruel reference to the actor James Corden. His best friend Tom had started it. “She looks like JC, and I’d rather shag James Corden than her. ”
The messages were grotesque.
They talked about her like she meant nothing. Natalie had no idea. In July 2012, just days after they first slept together, Natalie texted Adam to tell him she thought she was pregnant. He did not react well.
He sent ugly messages. “It’s nothing to do with me. You’ll have to prove it. I don’t want it.
”
Natalie kept texting him. She sent nearly a thousand messages over the summer. He either ignored them or sent rude rebuffs. To his friends, he complained that she was a blight on his life.
He told them she was bringing him down. Then he started claiming he was having suicidal thoughts. Adam Wheeleran, experts would later say, was the type of person who responds badly when control is taken away from him. A pregnancy scare was a massive challenge to his control.
On the 23rd of July, about ten days after Natalie told him she was pregnant, Adam tweeted a message:
“It’s all right to kill someone these days, isn’t it? Think I might just do that. ”
A week later, he tweeted again. “I think I might do it.
#murderousmind. ”
His friends saw these messages. They didn’t tell anyone. They didn’t stop him.
They joined in. On the 6th of September, his friend Tom texted him. “Why don’t you just get on and kill her? ”
On the 17th of September, Tom tweeted, “The end is nigh for JC.
The end is nigh. ”
On the 19th of September, Adam texted another friend, “I’m going to do JC tomorrow. ”
Nothing happened that day. But the fantasy continued.
On the 1st of October, Adam drove Natalie and a friend to Burger King. Afterward, he dropped the friend off and drove around with Natalie for a few hours. Something spooked her that evening. She posted on Facebook that she was being kidnapped.
Her sister messaged her about the post. Natalie made light of it. She said it was just a joke. But Adam told a friend that the post had stopped him from killing her.
He said he had his knife ready. He was ready to do it. He backed down. On the 3rd of October 2012, Adam suggested another late night meeting.
That evening, around six-thirty, Adam went out drinking with his friends in Sidcup. His best friend Tom was with him. They went to a golf club, then to another pub. By the time they reached the third pub, Adam was several drinks in.
At 9:40 p. m. , he sent a message to Natalie. He asked if she wanted to meet up and talk and have sex.
She kept texting. “How am I to believe you? You’ve been mugging me off all this time. ”
He wrote back.
“No, no, we’ll go and talk. We’ll have fun. ”
She agreed. The last time she would ever go to see him.
Natalie finished her shift at McDonald’s early. She called her stepdad Mark and asked him to come and pick her up. She got home, had a shower, and went to the kitchen in pajamas and a pink dressing gown. She had a cuddle with her mother and said, “I’m going out of Adam for a bit.
”
At 10:32 p. m. , Adam messaged her from outside. She texted him back two minutes later.
“Bye. ”
Then she shouted up the stairs. “Slers. ”
“Love you,” her mother shouted down.
“And thank Christ I did,” she would later say. Natalie left the house carrying only her phone and keys. She got into the passenger seat of Adam’s car. She didn’t know that his friend Tom was concealed in the boot.
Tom was lying in the dark sending messages to a female friend. He wrote something about being in the boot of the car and not knowing whether Adam was about to do something terrible. He even tried to send her a photograph of his hand in the darkness. The car drove toward Swanley Village.
They parked up. Natalie was convinced. She didn’t know this was the place they’d been before. During the drive, she noticed a warning light on the dashboard.
It indicated that the boot was open. By the time they reached Button Street, Natalie insisted he stop the car. She got out and walked to the boot to check it was shut. That was the moment the sick joke became real.
Adam Wheeleran started stabbing her in the throat. He inflicted twenty stab wounds on her neck. One wound was four inches deep, almost severing her carotid artery. She fought back.
Her hands and arms had defensive wounds. Natalie staggered toward a lit window in the village, but she fell before she made it. Adam pursued her and carried out one final act. “I’m dying.
Please ring my mom,” she said. He took her phone and threw it over a hedge. Then he got back in the car and drove off with his friend. Natalie died alone on the road.
Adam returned to the car covered in blood. Tom was now in the driver’s seat. Back in his hometown, Adam messaged his friends: “Done. Not lying, covered in blood.
So sorry I let you boys down. ”
A passerby found Natalie lying at the side of the road and gave her CPR until paramedics arrived. They couldn’t revive her. She was declared dead at 11:30 p.
m. Seven minutes later, eight miles away, Adam and his friends were buying beer and cigars. Adam was covered in blood, but he stayed in the car and gave his credit card to a friend. They bought alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, and scratch cards.
Then they went back to a friend’s house. Adam smoked cigars, drank, and bragged about what he’d done. His friends sat with a man who was covered in blood and told them he’d just killed his girlfriend. And they all had another drink.
Eventually, though, the camaraderie turned to horror. His friends urged him to go to the police. At about 3:00 a. m.
on October the 4th, Adam Wheeleran walked into Bexleyheath Police Station with blood on his face and hands. He said he thought he had killed someone. He told officers he’d slashed a woman’s neck and left her. He claimed it was self-defense.
He said she had brought a weapon and attacked him, and whatever happened to her was his defense. It was a story full of holes, told by a man who seemed completely unmoved by the part he played in his friend’s violent death. The night of October 3rd was the night Natalie died. But the day Adele Jarvis’s world came crashing down was the morning of October the 4th.
She woke up and Natalie wasn’t in her bed. She thought her daughter might have been in an accident. She rang her phone. Nothing.
She called 999. A detective came to the house. He told them to sit down. “I need to tell you something,” he said.
“We found a body and we believe it’s your daughter. ”
Adele screamed at him. “How dare you come into my house and tell me my daughter’s dead? You don’t even know what she looks like.
”
Natalie’s sister Gemma got a call from Mark at work. He was crying. “Gemma, you need to come home. ”
It took days before the family could see her body.
When they pulled back the curtain in the morgue, reality hit. Natalie had a towel up to her chin to hide the wounds around her neck. They were allowed to touch her face and her hair. They kissed her and cried.
“It’s the worst image,” Adele said. “You just don’t want to ever see that. ”
Natalie’s funeral was on the 19th of November. She was in a white coffin with a rainbow on it because her life was so colorful.
More than three hundred people came. People from all walks of life that Natalie had touched. It was a big party, and Natalie would have loved it. In April 2013, five months after the funeral, the family attended the trial at Maidstone Crown Court.
Adam Wheeleran and his friend Tom were both charged with murder. Both pleaded not guilty. For the first time, the Jarvis family saw Adam Wheeleran. “He looked like a little boy,” Adele said.
“He didn’t look like he was sorry. ”
The prosecution presented forensic evidence that demolished his self-defense claim. Natalie had been stabbed more than twenty times. The depth of the blows was eleven to twelve centimeters.
The furious stabbing to the most vulnerable part of the body was not self-defense. It was rage. The prosecution presented hundreds of text messages that proved the murder was premeditated. They showed that Adam had no interest in seeing Natalie for a month, and then, for the first time in a thousand messages, he asked her out on the night he killed her.
There was DNA evidence. The multi-tool sheath with his fingerprints. His bloody tracksuit bottoms. Tom was properly tried and properly acquitted.
Even at the last minute, he probably genuinely believed that what had happened couldn’t really be happening. On the 24th of April, the jury retired. They took less than four hours to convict Adam Wheeleran of murder. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-six years.
The judge made it clear. Adam could have gotten rid of his phone. He could have changed his number. He didn’t have to come and pick her up.
He wasn’t forced into any of this. He could have walked away. The family never got the answer they wanted. They asked Adam, directly.
Did you feel anything for her before this happened? No. After it happened? No.
Do you feel anything about her lying on a slab in a morgue? No. Do you feel anything for her now? Her mother’s sitting over there.
Any feelings for that? No. “It was as if he wasn’t the same species as us,” Adele said. Natalie had not been pregnant when she died.
The threats, the rage, the murder. All of it for nothing. When Adele thinks of Natalie now, she just thinks fun. “She was my world.
Her and her sister are everything and more to me. I’m privileged and honored to be their mom. ”
A simple story of two young people enjoying each other’s company descended within months into a callous murder plot hatched by a man whose friends did nothing to stop him. Natalie Jarvis was a loving young woman who brought only joy to the people who knew her.
In taking her life, Adam Wheeleran proved himself to be one of the world’s most evil killers.
