LONDON – Sarah Sands, the 32-year-old woman facing a murder charge after admitting to stabbing her pedophile neighbor to death, was convicted of manslaughter.
Sands neighbor, 77-year-old Michael Pleasted, was a nasty peice of work. He was a convicted pedophile who had a history of sexually abusing young boys dating back to 1970.
He has been convicted of 24 sexual offences involving children but has only spent a little over six years total in jail. In the months before Sands gave him eight new holes to breathe from, he was facing new charges of molesting three other boys.
His trial was scheduled for this summer, and the prosecution was considering a third charge against him. That is until Sands saved everyone from a lot of time and money.
Remarkably, Pleasted was granted bail and allowed to return home while awaiting his trial. Sands, who lived across from Pleasted, wasn’t having any of it. On November 28 of last year, she drank two bottles of wine and then paid her neighbor a visit – with a kitchen knife, a hammer and and a wrench inside her purse.
She would later say she went to confront him about the new charges and had armed herself because she was afraid of him. She said this confrontation turned into a violent argument because, she says, Pleasted just smirked at her when confronted and claimed the boys were all liars.
This argument led to Sands stabbing the man eight times, one of them hitting an artery in his left arm. When police found him, they say it looked as if he bled to death while trying to crawl to his front door.
Sands turned herself into police the next day, admitting that she was the one who had stabbed “the devil” to death.
“Who houses a fucking pedophile on an estate, like seriously? He was asking for trouble.” Sands told police during her interview. “Somebody had to protect people, somebody had to do something.”
Sands went on to tell police that she thought Pleasted was just a nice, harmless old man before telling detectives: “He’s fucking harmless now, ain’t he?” Yes, indeed.
Sands went on trial for murder, but earlier this month a jury found her not guilty. Citing a loss of control, they convicted her of manslaughter instead. Her sentencing is scheduled for sometime in September, after all of her psychiatric evaluations have been completed.
This article was written by Morbid for The Dreamin Demon - the Internet's self-appointed buzzkill.