Image – Shutterstock: Old Bailey, London
A controlling and violent boyfriend stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death after she refused to abort their unborn child, the Old Bailey has heard. Shaine March, 47, is accused of murdering 32-year-old Alana Odysseos at her home in Walthamstow last July, just weeks after she discovered she was expecting her third child. Jurors were told March denied being the father, demanded that Miss Odysseos get an abortion, and on the night of the killing she was heard pleading: “I don’t want to kill my baby.”
Prosecutor Louise Oakley said Miss Odysseos, who had suffered the loss of two previous partners, “was vulnerable and all she wanted was to be loved. She desperately wanted to create a family environment for her two-year-old daughter.”
Friends described how March controlled her life, forbidding her from speaking to people and forcing her to delete male contacts from her phone. He threw away her daughter’s toys, once smashed a glass in her face, and regularly hurled verbal abuse at her.
Despite pleas from her sister to leave, Miss Odysseos stayed, clinging to March’s promises that he would change. The day before her death, she told her sister he was “acting up”.
“U deserve so much better,” came the reply.
“Can’t help who u love but he don’t love any of us,” Miss Odysseos responded.
That night, neighbours heard a furious argument, with a man shouting “pregnant” and a woman crying “come back” and “I don’t want to kill my baby.”
March had come to help move furniture, but an argument erupted. Miss Odysseos recorded parts of the confrontation on her phone, but March destroyed the device before police could seize it. At around 3am, neighbours found Miss Odysseos collapsed outside her home in her nightclothes, bleeding from multiple stab wounds. She was shouting, “Shaine stabbed me… help, help.”
She had been stabbed 24 times and died from her injuries.
March fled, telling his mother: “I just killed a woman and I’m going back to jail.”
He was arrested hours later by armed police in a café, covered in blood, and told staff: “I killed my wife and child.”
In custody, he called himself “scum” and a “sickhead”, adding: “I hope the baby in her belly is still alive. But I did say to her, have the abortion.”
The court heard that March had previously served time for a violent offence and was out on licence at the time.
He has admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but denies murder, claiming an abnormality of mental functioning. Prosecutors dispute this, pointing to his destruction of evidence and admission that he expected to go back to prison. “He had violently killed his partner in a fit of anger,” said Miss Oakley. “But he knew what he was doing.”
A blood-stained kitchen knife was found in the garden.
Miss Odysseos’ final moments, and her desperate pleas to protect the life growing inside her, offer a haunting portrait of a woman determined to preserve life even as her own was taken.
SPUC has said many times before that abortion is the favourite tool of the abuser, and this is further proof. Abortion does not liberate women; it chains them to violent men who want to shirk their responsibilities. So-called ‘women’s rights campaigners’ should look at cases like this and shudder. March remains on trial.
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