Shaun Corey

A woman told a court yesterday how she drugged and suffocated to death the father of her child before hiding the body in a wheelie bin in her bedroom.

Karen Otmani, 42, who is said to suffer from mental health problems described to the Old Bailey how she killed 42-year-old Shaun Corey in the flat they shared on Stanstead Road, Lewisham, in June last year.

Otmani broke down in tears as she told the court how she wanted to ‘shut him up’, but claimed she never meant to kill Corey.

“Shaun was so mean and horrible I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “I wanted to shut him up. I wanted to shut him up and I did, but I didn’t mean to. I really loved him.”

She spoke of the verbal and physical abuse she had suffered at the hands of Corey, claiming that on one occasion he had anally raped her after drugging her with Rohypnol – the same drug she subsequently used to spike his drink the night she killed him.

After killing Corey, Otmani said she had gone to the kitchen to make him a breakfast of cheesy beans in an effort to “wake him up”.

Police discovered the body of Corey eleven days later wrapped up in tarpaulin inside a large green wheelie bin in her bedroom. The body was so badly decomposed that a full post-mortem was not possible.

The court heard last week how Otmani had used the bin with the body in it as a sideboard to keep her television on. It was claimed she also intended to leave the body to rot so that she could then grind up the bones into a dust and sprinkle them around the country.

Bobbie Cheema, prosecuting, said Otmani was heard arguing with Corey in the bedroom, before being joined by her friend Bernard Beddoe, 60.

Otmani and Corey were heard arguing in the bedroom early on the morning of June 4, 2011, said the prosection. Beddoe, who Otmani called uncle, is said to have then joined them. After ten minutes it then went quiet.

“Shaun Corey died at the hands of these two defendants”, Cheema said.

Otmani denies murder on the grounds that she was suffering from ‘battered woman syndrome’.

Beddoe of Brockley also denies charges of murder, as well as an additional charge of assisting Otmani knowing she had killed Corey.

The trial continues.