Moment ex-soldier confronts neighbour in parking row months before double killing

10 June 2022, 16:13 | Updated: 10 June 2022, 16:21

Police footage shows Collin Reeves and Jennifer Chapple in parking row

Chilling footage has shown a former soldier arguing with his neighbour over car parking just months before he knifed her and her husband to death.

Ex-commando Colin Reeves is seen confronting 33-year-old Jennifer Chapple outside her home in May last year.

He is heard telling her "you can't park there", to which she replies: "You don't own the road."

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The clash developed into a six-month feud that ended with Reeves grabbing a ceremonial dagger he got upon leaving the army and stabbing Mrs Chapple and her teacher husband, 36-year-old Stephen Chapple.

He is currently on trial at Bristol Crown Court, where he has denied murder but admitted manslaughter.

Jurors were played a chilling recording of Reeves' 999 call, made minutes after going to the married couple's home and attacking them with the dagger.

The operator at one point mistook Reeves, 35, for the injured party, asking him whether he was harmed before he told her: "I went round with a knife, I've stabbed both of them."

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Asked whether the couple were awake when he left, he replied: "No, I think they were sort of drifting.

"He was lying on the floor, she was lying on the sofa."

When officers arrived at the scene, the couple's children were still asleep upstairs at the home in Dragon Rise, Norton Fitzwarren, near Taunton in Somerset.

Reeves had been involved in a long-running dispute with the couple over designated parking on the new-build housing development.

Just 10 days before the killings, Reeves allegedly verbally abused Mrs Chapple outside her house following an earlier exchange between the victim and Reeves's wife Kayley Reeves.

He claims he was suffering an abnormality of mental functioning at the time of the killings and has admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

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His mother Lynn Reeves said in a filmed police interview played earlier to jurors that her son is a "closed book" who "never shares his emotions".

He served in the Army between 2002 and 2017, including in Afghanistan, but never spoke about what he saw there, she said.

It was claimed that Reeves appeared to have been struggling with his mental health since he returned from Afghanistan.

Lynn Reeves wept as she attended court in person to give live evidence on Friday, detailing how she found Reeves "white as a ghost" on the night he killed his neighbours.

She said she had been phoned by an "hysterical" Kayley Reeves saying "they're dead".

"He was white as a ghost, he was just white and he just didn't look like Collin. He was just standing, he just looked right through us as if he wasn't there and said 'I had to protect my family'," she said.

The trial continues.