Winter Swan-Miller stabbed Stuart Crocker 27 times before strangling him, a court hears.
A woman who joked in a TikTok video she had been a “bad girl” after murdering an Army veteran has been jailed for life.
Winter Swan-Miller, 37, of New Street in Andover, Hampshire, stabbed 62-year-old Stuart Crocker 27 times before strangling him with the strap of her handbag at his flat in Andover in 2023.
Sentencing Swan-Miller at Winchester Crown Court, Judge Angela Morris described her as a “highly manipulative person who was prepared to do or say anything to get what she wanted”.
She will serve a minimum of 23 years for his murder.
The court heard Swan-Miller, who had been staying with her victim, posted a video on TikTok after the murder on 23 June 2023.
In it she said she had been a “bad girl” and urged people to write to her in prison, and also wrote numerous notes about the killing.
In the video, she also said she did not “feel I’ve done a bad thing at all”.
A spokesman for Hampshire police said further unpublished videos were found, including one where she claimed Mr Crocker was complicit in her dog being stolen.
Police said she was arrested after they found her victim’s bank card was being used to withdraw cash in the Aldridge area of the West Midlands, near to where Swan-Millar was staying with another man.
In that flat, officers found a notebook, diary and sealed envelopes belonging to Swan-Miller, and in some of the notes she confessed to killing Mr Crocker.
Judge Morris said she was “satisfied there was no sexual exploitation” of Swan-Miller, and that “if there was any level of control and coercion, that came much from you toward him than the other way round”.
Mr Kingswell said his father “was a good man”.
“The day you, Winter Swan-Miller, entered my father’s life was the day you brought ruin to whatever sanctity and innocence left in Stuart’s mind, a mind addled by age, the PTSD from serving his country during the Northern Ireland Troubles and the alcohol that followed,” he said.
“You are a malevolent entity that seeped into the mind of Stuart, you took the strings, strung his frame and controlled him.”
Det Supt Rod Kenny said Swan-Miller killed Mr Crocker “in the most violent of ways”.
“She then spent some hours cleaning the scene, posting on social media and going about her daily business before she fled the county to Walsall,” he said.
“When there, she was not laying low or hiding out but instead she continued to take drugs, party and record further material where she sought to justify her crimes.
“All the while, Mr Crocker lay in his flat undiscovered.
“To this day Swan-Miller has expressed no remorse for the life she took and the pain this has caused so many.”
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