Satanist stabbed victim on Nazi altar

A devil worshipping student stabbed his girlfriend to death on an altar decorated with Nazi symbols and offered her body as a sacrifice, the Old Bailey heard today.

Conrad Stanford, 20, dragged his screaming victim to the altar festooned with a swastika and skull and crossbones and inflicted 67 injuries.

He then dragged her from the place of the attack, her flat, some distance back to his flat where he had a homemade shrine.

The Montserrat-born student, who was found to be suffering from a psychotic personality disorder, had been monitored by Hackney social services. A social worker was so disturbed by the sight of his black-painted flat, a shoebox full of knives and Stanford's "offensive views about race and women" that he refused to visit him at his home, said Crispin Aylett, prosecuting.

The victim was Paula White, Stanford's 20-year-old girlfriend whom he had met at Southgate College. She had just started a degree in psychology.

At college he was "confrontational", decorating work folders with iron crosses and the devil's sign, 666, which upset other students. His college tutor John Morgan described him as "a Michael Ryan [the Hungerford mass-killer] waiting to happen".

Stanford had only recently left the care of the local authority children's home where he was taken after being abused by his mother.

Judge Brian Barker ordered Stanford, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, to be sent to Broadmoor maximum security hospital for psychiatric tests before sentencing.