The equestrian trio who covered for a killer: Beautiful, young Katie was raped and murdered by her sister's jockey boyfriend, then betrayed by 'friends'... now one confesses her shame

Daily Mail​

11-07-2025

In the tight-knit equestrian community circles in which they mixed, Jill Robinson and her friends worked hard and played hard.
'We were wild enough all right,' she recalls. 'A lot of it can be like a Jilly Cooper novel. We worked together, hung out together, living the horsey dream.'
Among those living that dream were a clutch of young women: Christina and Katie Simpson, horse-mad sisters from the village of Tynan in Northern Ireland, groomer Hayley Robb, and a teenage British equestrian star called Rose de Montmorency-Wright.
Then there was Christina's partner Jonathan Creswell, a charismatic 36-year-old jockey-turned-trainer who walked through the local stable yard in Derry with all the swagger of a celebrity.
Creswell charmed everyone he met, and if anybody suspected that his wide smile and knowing strut masked a profoundly sinister side, then they said nothing.
Indeed to many, Creswell was a hero, especially when they learned that on August 3, 2020, he had tried frantically to save the life of Katie Simpson, the 21-year-old younger sister of his partner Christina, after finding her hanging from a banister.
As a weeping Creswell told police, he had managed to cut her down and administer CPR. But Katie, a bubbly, fearless and talented showjumper, hadn't taken her own life: she had been raped, beaten and strangled by Creswell in a jealous rage.
It would take months before police properly investigated and finally, in March 2021, Creswell was arrested and charged with her rape and murder.
But this was not the only startling development in this deeply troubling case, as the Mail revealed when the full story was laid bare last year.
For it swiftly emerged that Creswell was not only engaged in multiple sexual relationships with other women – including Katie herself – but three women had lied to try to cover up for him.
One of them, Rose de Montmorency-Wright, 22, had lived with Katie, Creswell and Christina, and had helped carry Katie's coffin at her funeral.
The others were Jill Robinson and Hayley Robb, those friends of Katie's who'd lived out their 'horsey dream' by her side.
All three women later pleaded guilty to offences ranging from perverting the course of justice to withholding information, and received suspended sentences.
Yet Creswell never faced justice, because at 9am on April 24, 2024, one day after the prosecution had outlined their case at his trial, his body was found at his home.
Now a compelling three-part Sky documentary has gained unparallelled access to Katie's friends and family, revealing new details about the case and unravelling Creswell's history of violence and lies.
Among those speaking for the first time is 43-year-old Jill Robinson, who discloses her infatuation with Creswell and remorse over her decision to take his bloodied clothes to a launderette in the wake of Katie's murder.
Among those speaking for the first time is 43-year-old Jill Robinson, who discloses her infatuation with Creswell and remorse over her decision to take his bloodied clothes to a launderette in the wake of Katie's murder.
'Every day I ask myself, 'Why did I do that, why did I wash them?' A lot of people don't understand the way he was, that you didn't question anything. You blame yourself so much, how you got yourself involved in something that led to such catastrophic results.'
Creswell was a handsome, talented young jockey six years her junior and Robinson's first love.
It was an 'all-consuming' passion, she says, even though his phone quickly started ringing with other girls at the end of the line.
'The first time I thought he was with someone else it was like complete devastation, like someone had taken out your heart and crushed it like an Easter egg. But he talked his way out of it,' she says.
Just as he did about the slaps, punches and hair-pulling he routinely inflicted on her. But that was nothing compared to the mental cruelty he was capable of.
Creswell had a way to 'make you feel that small, completely destroy your self-confidence', Robinson recalls. Their relationship ended in 2008 when she went to Australia.
Within a couple of months Creswell got together with a 23-year-old called Abi Lyle after meeting her at an equestrian event in Belfast.
A successful Olympian who competed for Ireland in Paris last year, Abi, now 40, speaks for the first time in the documentary about the devastating violence inflicted on her by Creswell during their nine-month relationship.
She weeps as she recalls being taken to woodland where Creswell kicked, punched and strangled her, threatening to dump her body as she fought to stay alive, aware of the devastating grief that would engulf her parents, who had lost her brother three years earlier.
'I was thinking, 'Don't let him kill you because your parents have already lost a child and they can't lose another one',' she sobs.
Like so many domestic violence victims, Abi blamed herself for Creswell's rages, and initially refused to co-operate with Nuala Lappin, a police officer her desperately worried father sent to her doorstep.
Only when Creswell threatened to dump her in a bath of bleach – which could end her riding career – did Abi pluck up the courage to leave.
'There was one thing I would always want more than him and that was horses,' she recalls. She escaped and used a pay phone to call Nuala for help.
Creswell was subsequently charged with a series of offences, among them false imprisonment, kidnapping and threats to kill, all of which he denied.
'Johnny's version of events was that he was Abi's saviour, that she was mentally unstable and that she would sit in the car and punch herself in the face,' says Nuala, recalling how he also tried to flirt with her and another female officer as they questioned him.
Finally, Creswell pleaded guilty to common assault and ABH and was jailed for six months.
But he emerged to a hero's welcome, greeted by a party attended by 30 friends, most of whom believed that Abi had made up her story to try to get compensation.
'Basically, he just picked up where he left off,' says Abi. Indeed he did, with Creswell quickly embarking on a relationship with Christina Simpson, one of six siblings from Tynan with whom he went on to have two children.
What no one knew is that he was simultaneously grooming her younger sister, Katie, who was just nine when she first met him.
'He controlled and coerced Katie since she was a child,' Detective Sergeant James Brannigan, the officer instrumental in bringing Creswell to justice, told a court hearing.
No one knows when his relationship with Katie became sexual, although some locals noticed that the bubbly young horsewoman seemed terrified of Creswell hearing suggestions that she might get a boyfriend.
'Don't go saying anything like that in front of Johnny,' a family friend, Chris Faloon, recalls Katie pleading with him after he suggested another showjumper might be keen on her.
Nonetheless, a few weeks before she died, Katie had embarked on a relationship with a showjumper called Shane McCloskey.
The extent of her fear of Creswell was exposed in a frantic exchange of messages with McCloskey, in which she begged him to lie about the fact they had spent the previous night together if Creswell got in touch.
'He'll kill me,' she wrote.
It proved a tragic premonition as, 24 hours later, an outwardly devastated Creswell rang the ambulance service to say he had returned from dropping off his children at his mother's house to find Katie hanging from the banister of the family home.
He insisted on taking her directly to Altnagelvin Hospital in his car to avoid paramedics visiting the house. He played the devastated brother-in-law to perfection, shellshocked and weeping at Katie's bedside.
'No one was more distraught,' recalls Robinson.
Not everyone was convinced by Creswell's story, however. Some nurses raised concerns over bruises on Katie's body. Her injuries were 'shocking' says DS Brannigan.
'Her hands were like boxing gloves, they were that swollen and bruised. There were marks on her legs, on her inner thigh, there was a massive bruise on her shoulder, a small cut to her lip and bruises on her arms.'
Katie's friends – Jill and Hayley – claimed she'd fallen from a horse the day before, but Brannigan was not convinced. Indeed, Katie had not fallen – this story had been put about by Creswell in a bid to cover his tracks.
Nonetheless, when Katie died six days later, having never recovered consciousness, the narrative that she had taken her own life had been set in stone.
Certainly, local police seemed uninterested in investigating. Tanya Fowles, a journalist who knew Katie and had suspicions that all was not right, recalls a Derry police officer accusing her of being a 'curtain twitcher' when she rang to alert them to Creswell's previous convictions for violence.
DS Brannigan, who worked in County Armagh but had been contacted by Fowles to see if he could help, recalls how he was similarly stonewalled, with Derry detectives telling him Katie had tried to take her own life twice.
As he later discovered, they had mistakenly logged two suicide 'attempts' – the first when she arrived in hospital and the second when she died from her injuries.
It would take six months of dogged work by Brannigan – and questions from Katie's relatives – for Derry police to finally open an investigation.
When previously unexamined internal swabs taken during the post mortem came back showing Creswell's semen, detectives had enough to arrest him.
Even then, Creswell tried to bluster his way out of it, announcing he'd been in a relationship with Katie since she was 17 and that they'd had sex several times the night before she'd gone to hospital.
His arrogance would also be his undoing, however. Later in the interview, he drew a diagram showing how he'd found Katie.
'He said she was 'kissing the wood' meaning her head was facing the inside banister,' Brannigan recalls.
Yet when the detective revisited the scene he discovered that the strap with which Katie had purportedly hung herself was not long enough to do this.
It was a 'Eureka moment' says Brannigan. 'We could see Katie did not die the way.' On March 6 2021, Creswell was charged with Katie's murder – the first of what would prove to be several criminal charges in relation to her death.
In the weeks that followed, astonished detectives uncovered CCTV footage showing Hayley Robb following Creswell's car home from hospital before entering his home then leaving with a bag and placing it in the boot of her own vehicle.
She subsequently admitted that as Katie lay dying, she and Robinson had taken Creswell's clothes to a launderette. Robb had also cleaned up traces of blood in the house.
Rose de Montmorency-Wright, who had platonically shared a double bed with Katie for a while, was subsequently arrested in England and brought back to Northern Ireland for questioning.
Brannigan says: 'She admitted to us 'Yeah. He told me he'd beaten Katie'. And I said 'Why didn't you tell us?' She said she believed Katie had taken her own life and didn't believe it was relevant. I pushed her on it, but she asked to speak to a solicitor and when she came back she wouldn't say anything.'
She subsequently pleaded guilty to withholding information, and received an eight-month prison sentence, suspended for two years.
Robinson received a 16-month suspended sentence for perverting the course of justice, and Robb two years, suspended for two years, for withholding information and perverting the course of justice.
Katie's sister Christina, whom police also believed was subject to coercive control by Creswell, was not prosecuted.
Loyal to the end, Jill Robinson, who visited Creswell in prison when he was on remand, confides that she felt she had 'let Johnny down' by telling the truth.
It subsequently emerged he was facing a catalogue of allegations from more than a dozen other women, among them a teenage girl who had spoken to police about being abused by Creswell.
What will never be revealed is why, as Abi Lyle puts it, Creswell had such a 'deep-seated hatred for women'.
'Where it came from I don't know, and I don't want to know' she says. 'But we were all bad, we were all whores, we were all the same. But in the end he was more scared of us than we were of him.'