A CONVICTED sex offender implicated in the death of a woman in Minehead was being recalled to prison the day after she died, an inquest heard on Monday (July 6).

Kelly Faiers, aged 61, of Weston super Mare, was found dead in the early hours of Sunday, October 15, 2023, in a flat in Blenheim Road, Minehead.

Paramedics found Ms Faiers lying on her back on the floor with her arms across her chest and her undergarments pulled down to her thighs.

The flat was home to Richard Scatchard, aged 70, who had been released from a life prison sentence for drugging women partners and sexually assaulting them and photographing them while they were unconscious.

Police also attended the scene but did not think there was anything suspicious and did not arrest Scatchard.

Kelly Faiers, whose death in a Minehead flat lived in by a convicted sex offender, was not initially considered by police to be suspicious.
Kelly Faiers, whose death in a Minehead flat lived in by a convicted sex offender, was not initially considered by police to be suspicious. (ASP)

The next day, when officers were sent to take Scatchard into custody, he had already gone on the run, sparking a massive manhunt with warnings to the public of the danger he posed to women.

The prison recall was not triggered earlier because probation staff did not consider Scatchard’s breaches of his licence conditions to be serious enough.

Scatchard was found dead six months later in a caravan near Watchet.

Senior Somerset Coroner Samantha Marsh conducted the first day of an inquest into the death of Ms Faiers on Monday, with the hearing not expected to conclude until Wednesday.

Mrs Marsh is then due to start inquest proceedings on Thursday into the death of Scatchard, which is expected to last until Monday (July 13).

A barrister representing the family of Ms Faiers said he saw only two conclusions which Mrs Marsh could reach, one being a ‘narrative’ and the other a finding of ‘unlawful death’, which was the family’s preference.

Mrs Marsh started Monday’s hearing by reading a list of Scatchard’s criminal convictions from the 1980s and 1990s.

A recent photograph of Richard Scatchard.
A photograph of Richard Scatchard issued by police after he went on the run following the death of a woman in his Minehead flat. (ASP)

These included kidnap, rape or attempted rape, administering poison and using chloroform on women.

Mrs Marsh said Scatchard’s modus operandi was to drug and sexually assault women with whom he was in a relationship, photographing and videoing them, and seemed to reflect a refusal to accept that a relationship had ended.

At that time, before dating apps, he would meet women through ‘lonely hearts club’ advertisements.

Scatchard was given a life prison sentence in 2001 because of the danger he posed to women, but there was a minimum tariff of five years and 10 months, and he was eventually released on licence in 2013.

Following his release, Scatchard had a six-year relationship with a woman from 2014 to 2020 and when that ended he moved to Minehead.

That relationship had been declared to, and was managed by, the probation service as part of his licence conditions.

After moving to Minehead, his licence conditions were amended to cover any internet activity to allow the probation service to monitor him properly.

However, Mrs Marsh heard evidence that Scatchard was discovered in 2023 to be using an internet dating site to try to meet women, which he initially lied about until confronted with the evidence.

He then did not reveal his relationship with Ms Faiers and it had gone on for about six months before probation and police found out, triggering the prison recall.

Police specialist rope teams have been called in to help the West Somerset hunt for missing sex offender Richard Scatchard.
Police specialist rope teams were called in to help the hunt for sex offender Richard Scatchard before he was later found dead. (ASP)

Scatchard’s probation case officer Bryony King gave evidence of her monitoring of Scatchard, who was assessed on his move to Minehead to be of low risk to the community, which was upgraded to medium level after the dating site discovery.

Ms King said later it was found Scatchard had been deleting his internet use history, which was a second breach of his conditions and it was decided to further tighten his licence by making him attend monthly face to face meetings with officers.

However, she said there had never been any evidence of Scatchard being in a relationship and even with hindsight there was nothing that made her suspicious.

Ms King outlined her powers to monitor Scatchard, but said they dd not include the ability to enter and search his flat, nor a camper van he owned, and she was only able to check the mobile phone he gave her and could not look for any other devices he might have been using.

A post mortem on Ms Faiers concluded she had most likely died from the effects of a combination of alcohol, antihistamine medication, and sleeping tablets.

She had drunk nearly three times the legal alcohol limit for driving, and although the amount of antihistamine was at the lower end of the scale it could not be ruled out as contributing to her death.

Family and friends of Ms Faiers told how she had spoken of Scatchard pressuring her to take up to 10 sleeping tablets because he wanted to know what it would be like to have sex with her while she was unconscious.

They said Ms Faiers had revealed Scatchard was domineering to the extent he would choose the clothes she should wear and even the colour of her lipstick, and always wanted to know where she was and what she was doing.

Ms Faiers was said for a time to have stopped replying to messages from Scatchard and had received 475 text and WhatsApp messages from him across just four days.

She once had take time off from work as a security officer at Bristol Airport when she suffered a black eye, for which she had given different explanations to different people.

One work colleague said Ms Faiers had met another man and wanted to end her relationship with Scatchard but said she needed to visit him once more to tell him face to face.

The inquest continues.