Aston Robinson, an 18-year-old from Cheltenham, England, who was sentenced to life behind bars Thursday for strangling and killing his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend, Kayleigh-Ann “Kay” Palmer, wrote letter to the dead girl’s mom in which he described sneaking into his parents house to have sex with Kay, signing off with “LOL.”
“LOL” is an abbreviation for “laugh out loud.”
Palmer’s unborn baby girl, of which Robinson said he was the father, was delivered at a hospital three days after Robinson strangled Palmer with a scarf in his own parents’ home and left her there for dead. But the 24-week-old baby did not survive, and Palmer also died after the delivery on April 5.
A coroner ruled that her death was due to brain injuries from being strangled by her jealous boyfriend.
Robinson wrote multiple letters to Helen Bage, Kay’s grieving mother, in which he attempted to express his guilt over killing her daughter. But the detective who investigated the murder says that he does not believe the convicted killer’s remorse is genuine.
“I don’t think writing letters to the mother of the girl you have killed — bearing in mind he used the abbreviation ‘LOL’ — is appropriate,” said Gloucestershire Police Chief Inspector Mark Little. “I haven’t seen any remorse. I don’t know what’s inside Aston Robinson’s head but I would be genuinely surprised if he was thinking about Kayleigh-Anne Palmer and the impact on her family.”
In the self-pitying letters, Robinson described himself as “single forever me,” and lamented, “I am so sorry for your loss, my loss as well, lost a daughter as well. I’ve lost everything that mattered to me.”
He added, “All that because I loved and adored her.”
He also told the heartbroken mother that he had once taken her daughter to Birmingham with the intention of getting a hotel room for the two of them. But they were turned away because they didn’t have proper identification.
Robinson then wrote that the teen couple “took the train home and snuck into my house lol x.”
Prosecutors charged that Robinson punched Kay Palmer after she teased him about the possibility that she might date other boys. He then strangled her with a tartan scarf because, Robinson told the court, “I wanted her to be quiet.”
He left the scarf tied around her neck and left the house to visit a nearby gambling parlor without calling for medical help. After Robinson’s sister, Michaela, discovered the desperately injured Palmer, the teen turned himself into police, accompanied by his father.
But Aston Robinson denied intending to kill his girlfriend, another assertion that left the detective skeptical.
“Anyone who puts a scarf and ties it — it was knotted when Michaela arrived — intends to kill them,” the detective said.
Aston Robinson was found not guilty of killing the unborn child. He will serve a minimum of 14 years on his life sentence.
The Aston Robinson conviction came a day after another British teen was sentenced for murdering his girlfriend and dismembering her body, a crime inspired by the TV show Dexter .