A BEAUTIFUL horsewoman, her charming abuser and a twisted web of sex, deception and violence – Fabulous investigates the tragic murder of Katie Simpson
Slumped in the passenger seat of the car, Katie Simpson’s life was ebbing away.
On the phone to a 999 operator, her sister’s partner Jonathan Creswell was being talked through how to perform CPR on her.
“Nothing’s happening. I think I’m hurting her,” he shouted down the phone.
It would prove to be a darkly accurate statement.
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Less than a week later, on August 3, 2020, 21-year-old Katie – a talented showjumper – died in hospital, having never regained consciousness.
The person responsible for her death? Jonathan Creswell.
Far from being the hero who, as he’d claimed to hospital staff, had found her after she tried to take her own life and rushed her to A&E, it was he who brutally attacked and raped her.
He then watched over her in hospital as, surrounded by her devastated family, she took her last breath.
Creswell, 36, who was in a relationship with Katie’s older sister Christina, and the father of Christina’s two children, was charged with murder in March 2021, seven months after her death.
As police unravelled the tangled web of sex, jealousy and violence, the case sent shockwaves across Northern Ireland.
Then, on the first day of his court case in April 2021, Creswell was found dead at his home in County Derry.
He had taken his own life.
Growing up in the small, close-knit village of Tynan, County Armagh, Katie and Christina were young girls when they first came into contact with successful jockey Creswell at a local stables.
He went on to have a relationship with Christina, with police believing he “coerced Katie since she was a child of nine or 10”.
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By age 16, Katie was working for Creswell at his stables, moving in with him and her sister and, at some point, beginning an affair with him.
At the stables, Creswell’s volatile temper was no secret.
“He would roar at them, and use disgusting language about them and they’d always just take it,” a source close to the family tells Fabulous.
“I remember him screaming and shouting at Katie once, and throwing a pipe at her while she was riding a horse, calling her all the names of the day.
"If that man wasn’t the devil, he was the devil’s son. Katie lived for the horses, she was always down the stables and you could see how much joy and happiness they brought her.
" She loved her sister so much, too – they were always really close – in one another’s shadows.
“He groomed both Katie and her sister.
"I hated seeing them under his spell.
"They’d be bright and bubbly and chatty when he wasn’t around, but they’d shrink into silence, trying not to catch his ire whenever he was around.”
In the weeks before she died, Katie started seeing showjumper Shane McCloskey.
Her final texts to him, sent the day before the attack, reveal her terror at Creswell finding out about them.
'VISIBLY UPSET'
“He’ll go crazy,” she said, about the fact they’d spent the night together.
“You’re terrified of him,” Shane responded. “It’s no good.”
After a horse show on August 2, 2020, Creswell – who had gone through her phone and discovered her relationship – put Katie into a horse truck, and the countdown to her murder began.
In the hours before she was taken to hospital, Creswell subjected Katie to a vicious rape and attack at the home in Lettershandoney, Derry, they shared with Christina and another young equestrian, Rose De Montmorency-Wright, 23.
After dialling 999 and being talked through CPR, Creswell didn’t perform chest compressions, despite pretending to the call handler that he had.
By the time he pulled up at A&E, with an unconscious Katie beside him, it was too late for her to be saved.
Staff at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry raised concerns with police that her injuries were not consistent with Creswell’s account that Katie had hung herself.
She had defensive wounds on her arms and hands, grip marks and boot marks on her thigh, and a post-mortem would later reveal she’d been subjected to rape and violent sexual assault.
Meanwhile, Kerry McKenzie, an equestrian who kept her horses at the same stables as Creswell and knew Katie, played a key role in casting suspicion upon him.
After Katie’s funeral in August 2020, at which a visibly upset Creswell had carried the coffin, Kerry contacted police and told them of her suspicions.
“I saw Jonathan Creswell at the wake, and I just knew at that moment, one million per cent, he’d done it,” Kerry has said.
Although police initially failed to investigate, despite being aware Creswell had served six months in prison for attacking a former partner in 2010, Kerry’s brave intervention helped turn Katie’s suspected suicide into a murder investigation in January 2021.
‘He had unfettered control on the lives of young women’
Police discovered it wasn’t just Katie and Christina who Creswell had active relationships with.
He had amassed a cult of women around him, and was facing a catalogue of allegations of sexual abuse and violence by 12 accusers.
Plus, he’d also extorted cash from women he was involved with. Katie had taken out a £10,000 loan and given the money to him.
Although Creswell took his own life before justice could be served, three women who helped him cover up the murder have appeared in court.
Along with Rose De Montmorency-Wright, who admitted a charge of withholding information, Hayley Robb, 30, from Banbridge, pleaded guilty to two charges of perverting the course of justice and withholding information after she cleaned Katie’s blood off a bannister in the aftermath of the attack, and Jill Robinson, 42, from Omagh, admitted to perverting the course of justice after washing Creswell’s bloodstained clothes.
Creswell was in a sexual relationship with all three women, who were also part of the Northern Ireland equestrian community and thoroughly under his spell.
'DEEP SADNESS'
The prosecution accepted none of the women believed they were covering up a murder, while a defence lawyer said Creswell was involved in a “web of relationships” and exercised “unfettered control on the lives of young women”.
Now, Katie’s family and the local community are left struggling to come to terms with her murder.
“When I saw Katie in hospital I felt a lot of frustration and anger coming from her as soon as I went in — I thought it was because she wanted to go,” said her heartbroken mum Noreen.
“If I had known what I know now, if any of the girls had been truthful about what they knew, I would have been so much better able to comfort her if I could have said: ‘We know what happened to you and we will get it sorted, that there is justice for your suffering.’
If I had known, Jonathan Creswell would never have been at Katie’s bedside when her heart stopped beating, nor at her wake or funeral.
“Katie lit up the room. [She] was very brave, caring, funny.”
For Kerry, the woman courageous enough to make sure Katie’s death wasn’t dismissed as suicide, a deep sadness remains.
“Behind it all, she was a broken young girl, a broken child,” she has said.
“Poor Christina will have to live with what’s happened [to her sister] for the rest of her life,” the source close to the family says.
“Those sisters would have done anything for one another, but in the end, nothing and no one could protect poor Katie.”
If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Samaritans for free on 116123.
