The brother of a Ramsgate woman killed by her on-off boyfriend 20 years ago has slammed the judicial system for failing victims after the offender was jailed this month for murdering another ‘girlfriend’ in Scotland.
Paul Fassam says Roger Crossan should have been spending life behind bars after the fatal stabbing of his sister, 39-year-old psychiatric nurse Sandra Rose Fassam, in April 1998.
Crossan, now 53, claimed Sandra’s death at his Cliftonville flat had been an accident when the knife he was using to cut her birthday cake ‘slipped,’ stabbing her through the chest and heart.
In 1999 he was jailed for eight years for manslaughter, serving six years and being released in 2005.
This month the vile domestic abuser was jailed for life, with a minimum 21-year term, for brutally murdering 57-year-old Moira Gilbertson in an Edinburgh flat last year and leaving her body to decompose.
Moira was stabbed in the chest by Crossan in a ‘carbon copy’ of Sandra’s killing 20 years before. He had also previously been convicted in 2011 for assaulting mum-of-one Moira by choking her but had received a supervision order rather than a custodial sentence.
Paul, 55, said Moira would still be alive today if Crossan had received the ‘appropriate’ sentence for taking former St George’s student Sandra’s life.
He said: “The judicial system failed. He stabbed my sister with a nine inch knife through her chest and broke her rib. He said he was cutting the cake and it slipped, that just couldn’t have happened.
“A massive mistake was made 20 years ago. He should have got life and then he wouldn’t have been out, the poor woman in Scotland would never have met him and she would be alive today.”
Paul said Crossan was a domestic abuser who had given his sister a black eye and, disgustingly, took her bank card after he had killed her and used it to draw money from her account.
Paul said: “Sandra was hard-working and loved her music, she was a bit of a hippy. She always wanted to help people and she thought she was helping him. That cost her her life.
“She got the black eye and then it got worse and worse. She told us she had finished with him but she had gone to see him that day.
“I don’t blame the police, they were gutted at the sentence he got, but I blame the judicial system.”
Paul says he and his sister Elaine are appalled that they found out Crossan had killed again only when a Scottish newspaper contacted them.
He said: “Why did no-one call us? I want an apology, not just for no-one telling us he had killed again but for the failure to stop this from happening in the first place. I want proper justice for my sister and for my family, what happened destroyed my mum and all of us.
“It is like my sister died in vain.”