Dead woman ‘meant the world to me’

Feb 9 2008 by Liz Keen, South Wales Echo

THE man accused of murdering married mum Beverley Parkhouse said she had been everything in the world to him.

Told that police officers believed he had been phoning a dating agency the day after she died, Roystan Moore, 53, said: “With Bev just dying, why would I want to contact anybody else?”

Moore denies killing Mrs Parkhouse, 45, in her father’s house, a mile from his own home in Nantymoel Row, Ogmore Vale, in September 2006.

Her bed was set alight, police say, in an attempt to hide the evidence.

In a series of interviews put before a jury at Cardiff Crown Court, he denied being jealous of Mrs Parkhouse’s husband of 27 years, Andre, when she told him intimate details of their married life, while he himself had problems with sexual function following a stroke.

He claimed he had visited her at her elderly widowed father’s home on the Thursday night – three days before she died – and there had been some sexual activity between them which left his DNA on the bedclothes.

But he denied being inside the terraced property on the Sunday she was suffocated.

When evidence of calls from his phone made to a dateline service the day after her death were put before him, he said he had no explanation.

“I can’t remember making them,” he told the officers.

“I’m gutted that Bev’s gone. I was in shock.”

He said Mrs Parkhouse had meant everything to him – “the world” – and that she understood him and his problems and had come out to his car to give him a ring as a token of their love hours before she died. When asked “Did you kill Beverley Parkhouse?” he replied: “No sir”.

It was thought at first that the mum of a grown-up daughter had died in the fire after smoking in bed but Moore was arrested some two weeks after her death, then again in February and in April 2007, before eventually being charged with murder.

(proceeding)