Five people are to stand trial accused of helping teenagers evade a police manhunt in the hours and days after the double murder of best friends Max Dixon and Mason Rist.
All five appeared today, Monday, before Bristol Crown Court for the first time together, to hear that a trial can’t take place until November this year. At the hearing on Monday February 10, three of the accused entered ‘not guilty’ pleas to the charges they face, and an application to merge their case with that of two other people facing similar charges was granted by the judge, bringing all five defendants to stand trial together.
Ellie Maddocks and Dominic Smith, both 25 and a couple from Westbury-on-Trym in Bristol, appeared at Bristol Crown Court for the first time today (February 10) and were formally charged with two counts of assisting an offender, which they both pleaded ‘not guilty’ to.
It is alleged Maddocks and Smith allowed Kodi Wescott and a 16-year-old, who cannot be named because of his age, to stay at their home in Westbury-on-Trym, and then drove them to an unknown address in Weston-super-Mare, between the dates of January 27 and January 30.
The charge faced by Marcus Williams, a 31-year-old from Westfield Road in Hartcliffe, relates to assisting Riley Tolliver, 18. It is alleged he drove Tolliver to an address in Weston-super-Mare before January 29 last year. He entered a plea of ‘not guilty’ to the charge in his first appearance at Bristol Crown Court on Monday.
The three were accused that ‘without lawful authority or reasonable excuse did an act…with intent to impede the apprehension or prosecution of… a person who had committed the arrestable offence of murder, knowing or believing him to have committed that offence’.
During the same hearing, the cases of those three were merged with that of two other people facing similar charges of assisting an offender in relation to the teenagers who murdered Max and Mason. Jillian Tolliver, 50, from Hartcliffe, and Kristian Hooper, 47, from Weston-super-Mare, have pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the charges they face at an earlier hearing last year.
All five were told they would face a trial that could take up to four weeks, which will start on November 17 this year.
Five people were found guilty by a jury late last year of the double murders. Best friends Max and Mason were stabbed to death outside Mason’s home in Ilminster Avenue late in the evening of January 27.
Antony Snook, 45, Riley Tolliver, 18, Kodi Wescott, 17, and two other teenagers who can’t be named for legal reasons, were all jailed for life, with a range of minimum terms to be served – from Snook’s 38 years before he can apply for parole, to the 15-year-old’s minimum of 15 years.
A week or so after the five were sentenced to life in prison for the attack, two other men were jailed for assisting an offender. Jamie Ogbourne, 27, and Bailey Wescott, 23, both from Hartcliffe, pleaded guilty to two counts of assisting an offender and were jailed for five years and three months