Out of the U.K.: Father Charged in Daughter's Murder

May 18, 2009

In October 2008 a group of children playing in the woods near Wishing Tree Reservoir, located near the United Kingdom's southeast coast within a few kilometers of the seashore town of Hastings, unexpectedly found a human skull.  Frightened by their macabre discovery, the children ran home and told their parents who, in turn, notified the police.  A number of thorough police searches in the days that followed turned up additional human remains, including a pelvic bone, tibia, an upper left leg bone that had sustained a fracture in life that had required a metal pin to hold it together, among other parts.  Each part was found in the vicinity of where the children had found the skull, and none of the remains appeared to have been buried.  By the time they were finished searching, police believe they had recovered about 90 percent of the remains. The police estimated that the remains had been in the woods for several months by some estimates and up to a year and a half by other estimates.  The remains were described as dismembered.
 
Less than a week later, the remains were identified using medical and dental records as those of 19-year-old Victoria Couchman who had resided with her young daughter and her father at their family home in St. Leonards-on-Sea, also near Hastings.  Strangely, she had not been reported missing by anyone, and police were at a loss with regard to a time frame of when she disappeared.  Her father, Tony Couchman, 45, had been caring for Victoria's daughter at the time the remains were found.

A neighbor said that the last time he had seen Victoria, "Vicky" as she was more commonly called, was when her father was giving her driving lessons.  The neighbor described the teenager as a "dedicated" mother who "spent hours playing with her daughter."  The neighbor also told the press that "Tony is always out in front of the house, mingling with neighbors and chatting away.  He's in a terrible state, grieving for his daughter."  The neighbor said that he had heard a sibling of Vicky's say that "this is the second brother or sister...who has died in a terrible way...she had a brother who died in a car crash a few years ago.  It's an awful tragedy for all of them."

Although it was generally believed that Vicky had disappeared several months earlier, perhaps as long ago as 2007, her Bebo social networking account had been used about 10 weeks before her skeletal remains were found in which several messages had been exchanged with a former friend of hers.  Baffled as to the identity of who may have used the account, the police learned that one of the posts that had supposedly been made by Vicky had demanded that a friend remove a R.I.P. photo of her dead brother. The friend's name had been misspelled in the posting - an error that police said Vicky would not likely have made.  The mystery surrounding her disappearance intensified when detectives received reports that the young woman had been seen alive earlier in 2008.

Complicating matters even further was the fact that a former boyfriend and father of Vicky's child, who had been in prison serving a sentence for burglary, had been trying for months to find out what had happened to Vicky.  Each time he made an inquiry, he was told that she had taken a new lover and had eloped he was also advised that he should not attempt to contact her again.

"I was devastated," the former boyfriend said.  "I thought Victoria wanted nothing to do with me.  I wanted to hear from Vicky and find out how our daughter was, but I was in jail and felt powerless to do anything."

Victoria's father was arrested and charged with his daughter's murder shortly after her remains had been found and identified.  Police accused him of killing the girl sometime between May 15-18, 2008, despite the uncertainty of when she actually disappeared and the fact that no cause of death has yet been established.  Anthony "Tony" Couchman is scheduled to make another court appearance on May 22, 2009; however, a trial date has not yet been set.

Photo Credits: Contributed

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