The emergency call was made in the early hours of Easter Sunday 2016, by a young woman called Emma-Jayne Magson from her home in Leicester.
Her boyfriend James had collapsed and was making ‘weird noises’, she said. The 999 operator could, indeed, hear a kind of guttural, low groaning in the background – at least initially.
Asked if she wanted an ambulance, Emma-Jayne replied that she did, but seemed unfazed when warned that it could be a while before paramedics arrived.
‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ she replied. ‘If I’m honest I think he’s took [sic] some drugs. I think he’s just a bit smashed.’
Toxicology reports would later reveal that James, a 26-year-old father of two, was indeed drunk and had taken cocaine and cannabis – but this wasn’t the reason he needed an ambulance.
For what Emma-Jayne, 23, had omitted to say was that she had stabbed her partner in the chest with a kitchen knife, an 4.5inch-deep wound that had penetrated his lung and a vital artery.
James died of his injuries that night, and Emma-Jayne was arrested, charged and tried for his murder at Leicester Crown Court. Proceedings were underpinned by one key question: while James may have lost his life that chilly Easter night, was Emma-Jayne Magson victim or perpetrator?
Had she, as she claimed, acted in self-defence out of desperate fear of her life, or was she simply a cold-blooded killer who’d shown little in the way of real remorse?
Emma-Jayne Magson, pictured, called 999 in the early hours of Easter Sunday in 2016
Emma-Jayne omitted to say on the call that she had stabbed her boyfriend, James Knight, in the chest with a kitchen knife
Emma-Jayne was arrested, charged and tried for James’s murder at Leicester Crown Court
As viewers of Channel 4’s hit TV series The Jury know, that vital question was one faced by another set of jurors last week.
The gripping series follows a group of strangers playing jury in what they know is a word-for-word reconstruction – albeit abridged and with identifying details concealed – of a real criminal trial.
What none of them knew, however, was that the case over which they presided was one of the UK’s most controversial and contested of recent years.
For the Daily Mail can reveal that the TV adaptation was based on not the first, but the second, murder trial of Magson, christened the ‘Steak Knife Killer’ in reference to the weapon she used to stab James Knight nine years ago.
She was initially convicted of his murder in 2016 and sentenced to life with a minimum term of 17 years.
However, she appealed her conviction, and secured a retrial, following fresh evidence pertaining to her psychiatric health: she’d suffered a traumatic miscarriage two weeks before killing James.
During the second trial, jurors were given the option of finding Magson guilty of manslaughter. However, she was convicted once more of murder by a majority verdict of 10-2.
A subsequent appeal in 2022 also failed and Magson, now 32, remains behind bars for at least another eight years.
Emma-Jayne was caught on police body-cam footage crying out for her boyfriend just moments after stabbing him with a steak knife and watching him die
In 2015 James moved into the small, terraced home on Sylvan Street, pictured, in Leicester, which Emma-Jayne shared with her 18-month-old daughter
So it was not one, but two trials, and a failed appeal. On the surface, at least, it seems that Emma-Jayne Magson is behind bars where she should be.
Yet as viewers of The Jury will know, this was not a sentiment shared by many of the jurors in the dramatised account of her trial. After tortuous wrangling, they convicted Sophie Fairlow – the name used for the accused in the dramatisation – of manslaughter in a majority verdict.
Told that the verdict in the original trial had been one of murder, they were palpably shocked – some because they felt they had shown her undue leniency, others profoundly dismayed by what they felt was an unfair conviction.
And it can be revealed that that divide is shared in the wider world, with many convinced that Magson is victim of a gross miscarriage of justice – as a vulnerable woman trapped in an abusive relationship with a violent partner.
Yet, there is an equal number convinced she is a cold-blooded killer with previous form for violence herself, and whose defence amounted to little more than a smear campaign.
Magson had received a caution for hitting a bouncer, had previous convictions for assaulting a woman in a pub and glassing another, and also had a history of violence against previous boyfriends.
In the former camp is Magson’s mother Jo, and the campaigning charity Justice for Women, alongside public speaker David Challen, whose mother Sally had her 2009 conviction for murdering her husband quashed in 2019 after Appeal Court judges heard she had suffered years of abusive coercion and controlling behaviour.
Together with his mother, he supported Magson’s bid for a retrial and today remains passionately convinced that her conviction should be overturned.
Emma-Jayne claimed she had acted in self-defence out of a fear for her life
26-year-old James had two young daughters with his former partner, Becki Waite (pictured)
‘I think there is still a huge lack of understanding about abuse and coercive control,’ David told the Daily Mail.
‘Emma-Jayne had suffered a huge amount of trauma in her past, in her relationship, and there needs to be a mechanism by which defence barristers give an avenue for juries to consider offending that is rooted in domestic abuse.
‘It is seismically present in the data, and it is the reason many women are in the prison system today. If nothing else, I hope that televising this case holds a mirror up to the way the system fails women like Emma-Jayne and my mother.’
Equally passionate that justice has been served, however, in real life at least, are James’s mother Trish and his four siblings, who have campaigned vigorously for Magson to remain behind bars.
While Trish declined to comment publicly, she is supported by male domestic violence charity ManKind who told the Daily Mail they believed Magson ‘must remain in prison’.
‘The two juries in the actual trials were rightly clear it was murder and not manslaughter,’ said chief executive Mark Brooks.
‘That was the right verdict. What the programme does show is how these particular jury members have been influenced by gender stereotypes; that if a woman kills her partner, there must always be some type of excuse or reason – including that the man was the real perpetrator.
‘My worry is that this verdict means there is a high risk that viewers will also have that view confirmed, or be persuaded by it.
‘It risks leaving some men and their families being denied justice and places male victims at risk because it will make it harder for them to feel they will believed – or that if they do tell someone, that person will feel they must have done something to deserve it.’
Heartbreakingly, the Daily Mail has also learned that the Knight family’s grief has been compounded by further tragedy, following the death in September 2022 of James’s younger brother Jack.
He took his own life after years of what family friend Siobhan Martin called ‘fighting demons alone’ in a poignant post to help raise funds for his funeral. He is buried alongside James at Leicester’s Gilroes Cemetery.
Inarguable then, that a trail of real-life grief and devastation lies behind this televised trial.
The undisputed facts are these: just days after meeting Magson in the autumn of 2015, James Knight – who had two young daughters with his previous long-term partner Becki Waite – had moved into the small, terraced home on Sylvan Street, Leicester, that his new partner shared with her 18-month-old daughter.
Their relationship was undeniably volatile, but within a few months, Magson was pregnant, only to suffer a traumatic miscarriage which led to her being hospitalised for a week and required her to undergo two blood transfusions.
On 26 March 2016 – Easter Saturday – the couple went out separately, later meeting in a bar where James, by then drunk, became so aggressive that police were called and he was asked to leave.
Both then got a taxi back to Sylvan Street, but the driver threw them out after they got into a violent argument in the back.
They continued the journey on foot and were seen and heard to be arguing loudly by passers-by. Not long before they returned home, CCTV footage showed James violently pushing his girlfriend to the ground.
It is from then on that the facts become disputed: according to the prosecution in both Magson’s trials, she entered her house alone, leaving her boyfriend banging on the door asking to be let in.
Armed with a knife, she then opened the front door, and stabbed him, with a blow delivered from above, as the prosecution barrister put it, in ‘the style of Lady Macbeth’.
At some point James then staggered along the road and collapsed near the home of his brother Kevin, who lived on the same street.
Yet, when he rushed to his brother’s aid, Emma-Jayne simply told Kevin he was ‘drunk’ and had been beaten up by bouncers.
Asked at her trial what impression he got from Emma-Jayne about his brother’s condition, Kevin replied: ‘That everything will be fine in the morning – he just needs to sleep it off.’
Poignantly, his last words to his brother, after helping Emma-Jayne to take James back home, were ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’.
Emma-Jayne then waited several more minutes before calling 999, and she again omitted to mention that she’d stabbed him. She also hid the knife in Kevin’s bin.
This delay, the court was told, ensured James had little chance of survival.
Described as ‘cold, brutal and manipulative’ for delaying medical help, Emma-Jayne had in effect ‘sacrificed’ James, according to prosecution barristers.
Emma-Jayne had suffered post-natal depression after the birth of her daughter
In a 2019 interview, Emma-Jayne’s mother Jo, pictured, declared that her dearest wish was for her daughter to be given her freedom once more
While Magson did not give evidence at her first trial, her defence barrister related an entirely different sequence of events, describing how, after allowing James into the house, he’d chased her to the kitchen and tried to strangle her.
In fear of her life, she had grabbed the knife in a bid to release herself.
As we have seen, that version of events was not accepted by the jury, who unanimously convicted her of murder.
With the help of Justice for Women, who believed Emma-Jayne had been grossly ill-served by the criminal justice system, her mother Jo instructed a new legal team who presented fresh psychiatric evidence supporting a defence of diminished responsibility.
In January 2020, the Court of Appeal quashed her murder conviction and ordered a retrial.
‘If I honestly thought, hand on heart, Emma really meant to do that [kill James], I would never stand by her,’ her mother said in an interview at the time.
‘But I just know Emma. I know she loves James. And that’s so frustrating for me because I know how much she loves him; even to this day she loves him.’
Those sentiments were not shared by James’s mother Trish, who in response launched a petition to keep Magson behind bars.
It is that subsequent retrial that was the basis of this week’s Channel 4 series, at which several psychiatrists testified that Emma-Jayne suffered from a personality disorder which meant she had problems controlling her emotions.
The product of a deeply chaotic and dysfunctional childhood, Magson was only eight months old when her father attacked her mother in front of her and her older sister, Charlotte, before disappearing from her life.
As an adult, she’d taken refuge in short-lived dysfunctional and often violent relationships.
Her previous convictions for violence, the jury was told, happened when she was in a relationship with a man who’d physically assaulted her and set fire to her personal possessions.
She had also suffered post-natal depression after the birth of her daughter.
None of this seemed to sway the second jury, who convicted her of murder with a majority verdict. A subsequent appeal in 2022 was rejected.
Barristers representing Magson had argued women in abusive relationships should be allowed to use the so-called ‘householder defence’ – in which a householder has the right to use disproportionate force against intruders – but the notion was rebuffed by Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett, who deemed it not relevant to the case.
‘There was no evidence or suggestion that it was any part of [Magson’s] thinking that [Mr Knight] was a trespasser at the time of the stabbing,’ he decreed.
It means that, with legal avenues now exhausted, Magson will remain behind bars, where the Daily Mail understands she is visited in prison every week by her now 11-year-old daughter.
And while empathising with James’s mother Trish, in a 2019 interview Jo declared that her dearest wish was for her daughter to be given her freedom once more.
‘I just hope Emma can come out and be a mum to her daughter and get on with her life,’ she told the BBC.
As we have seen, that sentiment was shared by some of the TV jurors this week.
Were they right? It perhaps is only fair to give grieving mother Trish the last word.
As she has said in the past: ‘There were only two people who were there that night. And one of them can’t give his version of events.’
