Defence minister’s niece jailed for sex murder

The 30-year-old niece of British defence minister Quentin Davies was today jailed for 15 years after stabbing to death a Frenchman she picked up while high on alcohol and a cocktail of drugs.

Jessica Davies, who admitted stabbing 24-year-old Olivier Mugnier in her Paris flat on November 11, 2007, described herself as a "monster" in the wake of the killing. She was convicted of murder by a court in Versailles.
 
Davies met Mugnier, a recent graduate whose nickname was Funtime, at an Irish pub in the Parisian suburb of St Germain-en-Laye where she lived. Davies, a former model, had been out earlier that night dining with a friend. After meeting Mugnier in the O'Sullivan's pub, she carried on drinking with him and invited him back to her nearby studio flat.
 
In court on Monday Davies told the nine-person jury how she and Mugnier tried to have sex but, after drinking alcohol and taking drugs, were unable to do so. Davies then went to the kitchen and returned with a knife. "I just wanted to cut him a little, but [the blade] went in by itself," she told the court.
 
Davies called emergency services after plunging the knife into Mugnier's neck, causing a 12cm wound. Paramedics found her naked and covered in blood, trying to stop Mugnier bleeding to death. Despite efforts to save him, Mugnier was pronounced dead an hour later, at 3.45am.
 
Mugnier's killing has inevitably sparked comparisons with another sex killing gone wrong - Meredith Kercher's murder in Perugia just 10 days earlier. American Amanda Knox, Italian Raffaele Sollecito, and Ivory Coast drifter Rudy Guede used a knife to kill Kercher as part of alcohol-fuelled sex game.
 
Unlike Knox and Sollecito, however, Davies admitted the killing. She told the Versailles Criminal Court yesterday that she told police: "It's me who did it. I don't know why, but I did it... I am a monster."
 
Looking pale and drawn, Davies told the jury that she had no memory of the killing except "the sensation of the knife going in".
 
On the night of the murder Davies had swallowed four different types of anti-depressant pills as well as smoking cannabis. She had also drunk enough to make her four times over France's legal driving limit.
 
The court also heard how she had endured a troubled and dysfunctional childhood as the relationship broke down between her father Richard - a British banker who is Grantham and Stamford MP Quentin Davies's younger brother - and her French mother Monique Henry, a French literature professor.
 
In court, Monique Henry described her daughter as "an adolescent who was disturbed by family difficulties" and who grew into a woman "unable to face day-to-day life". She also told the court how, in the months before Mugnier's murder, Davies had taken to cutting her own arms and legs.
 
In her defence Davies said she was depressed following a string of personal setbacks including splitting up with a long-time partner and a failed modelling career. Her downward spiral included two suicide attempts, the court also heard. ·