Drop Dead, Gorgeous

 

Here’s is a rather grisly painting of a man who had just been stabbed. I planned it out before painting it and used myself as a bit of a model (paid myself £5,000). I don't think I'd like to have it hanging on my wall but I lose interest in my paintings once they're finished anyway (I see them once a month when I go up into the attic to stop them all sticking to one another.)

 

Where did the idea spring from? I like all those crime programmes that like Crimes That Shocked The Nation and Real Crime that summarise some of the well-known crimes in British recent years. Many happened in the seventies when I was a boy and but I was about 30 I can remember eating my tea in the evenings and watching the stabbing of Lee Harvey unfold on the news.

 

Bar maid Tracie Andrews stabbed her fiancé bus driver Lee Harvey with a pen knife in a pique of jealousy. The aspiring model and her fiancé were driving on a country road back to their flat in Alvechurch in Worcestershire in the early hours on 1st December 1996. Both these attractive people (who each had a child) had been magnetically drawn to one another but both were of a jealous volatile disposition and explosive arguments were common. On that fateful night on a rural road nobody knows what really happened but Tracie lost control and stabbed Lee a total 42 times. Blood must have gushes after ten stabs but Tracie continued until the white heat of jealousy cooled.

 

I can remember the story rolling out on The 6, o, Clock News most evenings. A distraught Tracie appeared at a press conference claiming a "fat man with staring eyes" had stabbed her fiancé in a road rage incident and then disappeared. For two weeks police tried to track the murderer down. Under much pressure Tracie took an overdose and was taken to hospital. It was here suspicious police detectives first questioned her about the murder. They charged her soon after she'd been discharged.

 

She was found guilty at Birmingham Crown Court on 29th July 1997 and sentenced to life imprisonment. She claimed she was a victim of a miscarriage of justice due to the circus of publicity around the court case. Two years later she admitted there was no mysterious road rage incident and that she had stabbed her fiancé to death in self-defence.

 

In prison she changed her looks and name and had lesbian relationships. In November 2009 she underwent an operation to correct her protruding bottom jaw. She was released in July 2011 after fourteen years in prison and has since got married (there's a book Pure Evil: How Tracie Andrews Murdered My Son.)

 

If you want to learn more about the murder please go here...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS-mX5fq858

 

If you want to buy the painting its £30,000.

 

 

 

Sam doesn’t look impressed…

 

Looking at my pop whacking golf balls…

 

Templeton Peck of the A Team doesn’t look impressed either (note face on screen)…

 

 

About to paint the knife…

 

 

Looking at photos of Tracie Andrew and Lee Harvey which (probably) subconsciously inspired this painting…