Transgender woman Naomi Hersi was ‘drugged and stabbed to death’
A London trans woman was drugged and stabbed to death by a man she had met online, a court has heard.
Jesse McDonald, 25, denies murder over the death of Naomi Hersi, who was killed in Hounslow, west London, in March 2018.
The Old Bailey heard this week that Hersi had met McDonald on a hook-up website, FabSwingers.
Naomi Hersi (Twitter)
They met at her house and spent three days together before heading to the Heathrow Palace Hotel, where McDonald had been staying.
McDonald is accused of drugging Hersi, before killing her with a knife and broken bottle.
According to the Guardian, Prosecutor Mark Heywood, QC said: “After a time Jesse McDonald drugged her, fought with her and eventually killed her, stabbing and cutting her multiple times with a broken bottle and knife and perhaps other things.
“When it was done, when she was dead, he tried to clean it up and avoid detection.”
According to MailOnline, the court heard that McDonald then went to get cleaning products, contacting his girlfriend Natalia Darkowska, who was 17 at the time, for help cleaning the hotel room.
In text messages to Darkowska, he wrote that he had “f**ked up” and told her there was a “got a big drug dealer” on his floor who “won’t wake up… massive black guy.”
The prosecutor added: “His girlfriend, the second defendant, travelled to him and joined in with him at this stage of the attempted clean-up.
“Once she understood what had to be done, she went to buy the necessary things and tried to help and support him through it.
“Each was thinking only of themselves and each other – without a care for the deceased, whom they believed was unlikely, because of her lifestyle, to be missed.”
Naomi Hersi (Twitter)
The court was told McDonald had also called his mother, Sally Finley, telling her an elaborate false story involving being kidnapped and raped by paedophiles.
On the call to his mother, the man admitted stabbing the victim in a “frenzy,” the MailOnline reported.
His mother told him to call the police. She later called the police herself, and made a missing person report for her son.
Before McDonald could move Hersi’s body, she was found on the hotel room’s bathroom floor, half-naked and covered by a rug.
Hersi’s name and gender were incorrectly reported in many of the original media reports following her death.
McDonald denies murder, while both he and Darkowska deny perverting the course of justice.
The trial continues.
