Killers of newsreader sentenced to hang

Two men have been sentenced to death by hanging in Trinidad for killing a former BBC newsreader and two other people in a robbery.

The jury in Port-of-Spain deliberated for an hour before finding Daniel Agard, 21, and Lester Pitman, 26, guilty.

The victims were Agard's great-grandmother, Maggie Lee, 83, her daughter Lynette Lithgow Pearson, 51, and John Cropper, 59, Mrs Lee's son-in-law.

Mrs Pearson, who used the name Lynette Lithgow, presented news bulletins on BBC1 in the late Eighties. Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC News, said she was "a much trusted and popular colleague".

She had left broadcasting to study for a law degree at Oxford before taking up a fellowship at Harvard.

Mrs Pearson, who was Agard's great-aunt, lived in France but had returned to her native Trinidad to do some research for a biography of Ulric Cross, a retired Trinidadian judge who had f lown fighter planes for Britain in the Second World War. Her mother also lived abroad, in Toronto, but was accompanying Mrs Pearson on holiday.

Police found the victims with their throats slit in Mr Cropper's home in December 2001. Two television sets, a gold ring, two gold chains, a laptop computer and a car were among the stolen items. The murders occurred after the family held a tea party.

Police found a fingerprint matching Agard's on a jewellery box in the house and jurors saw a surveillance video of Agard withdrawing money from Mr Cropper's bank account a few days after the murders.

A neighbour of the Croppers told the court that she had seen Pitman outside the house on the evening of the murders.

Agard and Pitman had allegedly implicated themselves in a statement to the police but later claimed that they were coerced into signing with a promise of immunity.

Given the opportunity to speak before the verdicts were delivered, Pitman insisted that he was innocent but Agard had nothing to say.

Relatives of the victims burst into tears as the verdicts were announced.

If the death sentences are carried out, they will be the first executions in Trinidad since 1999. The Privy Council, the final court of appeal for British colonies, last week reversed its ruling of last year that Trinidad's mandatory death penalty for murder was unconstitutional.

Mrs Pearson began her career in Nottingham, presenting BBC Midlands Today.

An editor of that programme, Kevin Hill, recalled: "Lynette was a joy to work with. There was always a smile on her face and she sparkled on screen."

She also presented See Hear, a television programme for the deaf, and worked for CNBC in Singapore. She had two grown-up children.

Mr Cropper headed the Cropper Foundation, which ran workshops for young writers. His British-born wife Angela was away when the killings took place.

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