TRIAL UPDATE: Jury sees video interview with Frankum

A chilling and graphic admission by Benjamin Frankum, describing how he relentlessly stabbed Daniel Quelch to death, was played in court this afternoon.

A police video interview with the paranoid schizophrenic, then 25, hours after he was found covered in blood at the home of Mr Quelch's parents in Cherry Garden Lane in Littlewick Green on August 23 last year, was seen by the jury at Reading Crown Court.

In the interview Frankum told how he walked into the unsecured house and stabbed Mr Quelch as he slept.

He described how he then pursued him through the house and to the kitchen, where he stopped Mr Quelch from grabbing a knife from the drawer with ‘two or three seconds to spare’.

Frankum said he was an MI5 agent and had been ordered in a ‘mission briefing’ to go to the house with his boxer dog Arnie to kill Mr Quelch, the landscape gardener who Frankum claimed was a ‘torturer’.

The recording showed a calm Frankum, with shaggy hair and stubble, sometimes mumbling, at other times speaking coherently, laughing on occasion and re-enacting the stabbing motions.

He also described how he called an ambulance after to treat the fingers he cut during the attack.

The court also heard evidence from forensic investigator Caroline Hughes who said the DNA profiling and blood trail could be considered consistent with Frankum's account.

Defending, Miranda Moore suggested that an unidentified DNA sample also found at the scene could suggest a third party, which Ms Hughes accepted, but said could also simply be a glitch in the testing process. She added that DNA evidence from Frankum's clothes suggested 'extreme contact' between the two men.

The trial continues.