What Actually Happened To Lorraine Cox?

Murder is the most heinous crime a human being can commit. With the hit of the tragic murder of Sarah Everard, women across the world felt a fear rise up and take hold that we were not safe. I managed to disassociate the fear as it was in a different county to me. I felt sorrow and anger that it had happened but I wasn’t scared because I didn’t associate with the area in any way. This was until posters around my city of a missing woman, Lorraine Cox, started to appear.

Lorraine Cox was a 32-year-old woman who was from Devon, UK. She lived in Scotland during lockdown with her fiancé, Elise Fallow, however she’d recently moved back to Exeter, Devon because she had missed her friends and family back home.

In the early hours of September 21st 2020, Lorraine was walking home from spending time with her friends. She had been drinking and was on route back home when she was approached by a 22-year-old man called Azam Mangori. In CCTV footage, you can see Mangori follow Lorraine for over a mile before finally making the conscious decision to approach her and somehow, convince her to go back to his flat. This was the last time anybody would see Lorraine Cox alive.

For the next two days, Lorraine’s friends were starting to get worried. She wasn't acting the same on her Facebook and suddenly stated that she had moved away to a different city, Plymouth. Eventually on September 23rd 2020, she was reported missing and the search for Lorraine Cox started.

After finding the footage of Lorraine Cox with the young man, police eventually tracked him down. When arrested on September 8th 2020, Mangori gave the police a false name of Christopher Mayer and claimed to be homeless. He later gave an explanation for this. He said he had been brought up in the Kurdish region of Iraq and explained he grew up with very strict parents so he escaped to have a new life in the west. He said if he was to go back, he’d be stoned for his sexuality. Police eventually found out that he’d completely lied about being gay as an audio recording of him and Lorraine having a sexual encounter on the night she died, that he’d recorded himself, would surface. He later admitted to being Bi-sexual which police could not rule out as he had been in contact with both male and female escorts before the night of Lorraine's death.

The day after the arrest of Azam Mangori, police searched the alleyway behind his flat and found the dismembered arms and legs of Lorraine Cox. Four days later, they found the head and torso at a forested area called Tinpit Hill, 5 miles away from Exeter. Unfortunately, with the decomposition of the body, the coroner was unable to determine an exact cause of death. However, it is thought she died from asphyxiation as a t-shirt was found stuffed into her mouth. Mangori claims she died from alcohol poisoning.

There are two version of events that happened the night of Lorraine Cox’s death. The police’s theory and Mangori’s explanation.

Police Theory:

Police believe the night of Lorraine’s death was no accident. They have theorised that Mangori lured Lorraine into his place with the intention of killing her and did just that. This is backed up by videos that have surfaced online of Mangori vaping, sat on his bed with the body of Lorraine Cox lying next to him, whilst listening to Chop Suey's Angel’s deserve to die. His google search history also gives evidence to this as he searched how to dig a grave by hand hours after her murder. The actions Mangori took after the death of Lorraine also do not support the actions of someone who witnessed a drug overdose. Mangori hacked into Lorraine’s Facebook and used her sim card convincing her friends and family she was still alive and had moved away to Plymouth to start a new life. He’d even sent the middle finger emoji to her current fiancé because Elise was constantly trying to get hold of her and he wanted her to stop. After a week of leaving Lorraine’s body in his flat, he eventually dismembered her, put different parts into taped up bin bags and disposed of them. He had even gone as far to remove a tattoo on her body which indicated she was diabetic. Police believe he had a sexual interest in dismemberment as there were videos on his phone of men with prosthetic legs fighting.

Mangori’s Explanation:

Mangori claims the way Lorraine died was an accident and he acted the way he did after the fact because he panicked and wasn’t sure how to act in the situation he found himself in. Mangori says he and Lorraine had a nice conversation on the street which eventually led to them having a sexual encounter in an alleyway close to his home. He recorded it “just in case anything went wrong” and has expressed guilt in not recording the entire night to try and prove his innocence. They went back to his flat where they both drank shots of alcohol, had sex twice and smoked an unknown drug. Mangori claims that Lorraine pulled out a black substance from her pocket wrapped in foil. She put the lighter underneath the foil to heat it up and used a rolled-up bank note to inhale the vapour. He claims when he tried it that it made him feel weird, want to puke and left his eyes and brain spinning before he eventually blacked out. A toxicologist report concluded that Lorraine had no drugs in her system the night she died. Upon awaking, he said to have found Miss Cox on his bathroom floor unconscious with a wet patch of urine next to her. He tried to do CPR on her “like he’d seen in the movies” and eventually realised he didn’t know what he was doing. When asked why he didn’t attempt to get help or call an ambulance, his response was he was “too busy” on focusing how to do CPR correctly and “didn’t know” how to call an ambulance. He considered running away at that moment in time and then he claims to have seen “weird creatures” coming out of her mouth, something he now accepts was not real. He put a t-shirt in her mouth to stop the “creatures” from leaving her body. The cloth was so far back that it blocked her airways which, if this is true and she was somehow still alive in that moment, would have killed her in itself. Mangori later changed his statement saying liquid was coming out of Lorraine’s mouth, not bugs, which is thought to have been because the prosecution proved the “insects” could not have been real. Mangori explains the vaping video and the music as something to try and “cheer him up” and “get him out of the depression” he was feeling at the time. He admitted hacking into her Facebook and using her phone saying “it was not rocket science” and explained he did this so he wasn’t linked to the body and that people would not come to his flat because he didn’t want any trouble. He admits his initial “plan” was to use her Facebook and phone for her until she wakes up which he still expresses he genuinely believed she was going too. Mangori describes the next four to five days of his life as “a living hell” and he fell into an episode of mental health where he believed when he was dismembering her body that he was only chopping up “wet tobacco” he’d been storing in his flat. He, eventually, says that he thought he was hiding the “wet tobacco” from his boss when being asked what he was doing when disposing of Lorraine’s body.

If the story of Lorraine Cox’s accidental death is the truth, Mangori still did everything in his power after the fact to disassociate himself with the body, instead of helping her and calling the correct authorities. He admitted and pled guilty to preventing the lawful burial of Lorraine Cox. He was sentenced to 20 years in jail on the count of murder after a five week trial. The jury only had to deliberate for five hours before coming up with the guilty verdict.

With the inconsistencies in his story and the constant changing of details to fit the narrative, I feel he went out on a hunt for a victim that night. He'd searched how to get rid of a body and how to correctly dismember a body before he even crossed paths with Lorraine that night. My heart goes out to Lorraine and her family because this was something that could have been and should have been prevented.

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