Appeal date for axe killer

A Shropshire labourer jailed for life for murdering a Shrewsbury man with an axe will try to overturn his conviction next month. Trainee welder Julian Sanders, 20, was decapitated in the brutal attack by Maurice John Latus, who then dumped his headless body in a Birmingham park. 

Latus, of Wroxeter, was convicted of his murder in 2003 and his appeal will be heard at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, on November 23.

Mr Sanders’ parents, Russell and Avril Sanders-Royle wrote to the Home Secretary earlier this year, furious about the way victims’ families were treated.

They said no one had told them about the date of an earlier hearing and that their son’s name had been mispronounced throughout the hearing.

Mrs Sanders-Royle hopes to attend the appeal but did not know whether she could be there on the date set.

“I am very distressed really,” she added.

At the earlier Appeal Court hearing, the court heard that new psychiatric evidence had come to light on Latus’s mental state at the time of the killing.