A “cowardly” burglar who headbutted and fatally injured a frail pensioner during a nighttime raid has been jailed after the victim tried to protect his wife.

Ashley Malcom, 40, was sentenced at the Old Bailey to 18 years in prison, followed by five years on extended licence, after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of 86-year-old John Burke.

Malcom attacked Mr Burke after breaking into the home he shared with his 91-year-old wife, Peggy, on Fountayne Road in Hackney, east London, in the early hours of September 29, 2025.

Within hours of raiding the elderly couple’s home, Malcom, from Hackney, also broke into a care home and tried to burgle another flat while its occupants were inside.

During sentencing, Judge Simon Mayo KC said Malcom had embarked on a “sustained course of criminal conduct” during the night of September 28 and 29, 2025. His offending involved breaking into “several” residential properties, including the home of the “vulnerable” Mr Burke.

The judge said: “You entered the home of two elderly and vulnerable occupants. The burglary took place over a prolonged period.

“During the course of that burglary you headbutted Mr Burke. That headbutt fractured his nose and caused intracranial bleeding, and he died as a consequence.”

Judge Mayo acknowledged the “immeasurable” loss suffered by Mr Burke’s family, including his widow, to whom he had been married for many decades.

The court previously heard that Mr Burke was in poor health and living with several medical conditions, including dementia, when the attack took place.

Malcom broke into the property shortly before midnight and remained inside for an hour and a half before leaving with a wheeled shopping trolley.

After leaving the trolley’s contents at another address, he returned at 2.45am and spent a further 20 minutes inside the flat before departing with a box under his arm.

Later that morning, a carer arrived at the flat and saw that a window had been smashed and the kitchen was in disarray.

She found Mr Burke injured. He told her: “Oh thanks you’re here. He attacked me. He beat me up last night around 11pm, a 6ft-tall man. He used to be one of the caretakers.”

Mr Burke told paramedics that two men had headbutted him. He said he had been too frightened to leave his bedroom to call 999 and had waited seven hours for the carer to arrive.

Mrs Burke, who also had dementia, told investigators that she had slept through the attack.

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Mr Burke underwent tests at Homerton Hospital but was discharged and returned home at 2.35pm after a locum radiologist failed to detect the bleeding on his brain and his broken nose.

The following morning, his son Sean Burke found him unconscious on the bedroom floor. He was taken back to hospital by ambulance.

Tests confirmed that Mr Burke had suffered a “devastating and irreversible” brain injury, as well as extensive bruising and a broken nose. He later died from his injuries.

After burgling Mr Burke, Malcolm then targeted a residential care home in Hackney at 6.25am. When confronted by a support worker, Malcom ran towards him while making ‘loud groaning noises’.

Just after 6.55am, Malcolm tried to break into a third couple’s home in nearby Stamford Hill with a screwdriver.

The female householder had been in the shower and challenged him wearing just a towel. Her husband ran downstairs armed with a bicycle pump which Malcolm took from him and used to attack him.

Malcolm admitted burgling Mr Burke’s home of various items including food and medication, another burglary and attempted burglary, but denied murder and pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter part-way through his trial.

He also admitted assaulting the male occupant of the flat he tried to break into, causing him actual bodily harm.

Separately, Malcolm had admitted another burglary in May 2025 and an attempted burglary in July 2025 and possession of cocaine.

Judge Mayo noted the defendant’s addiction and mental health difficulties but said his ‘extensive’ history of domestic burglary was a ‘substantial aggravating factor’ in his offending. 

Mitigating, defence barrister Emin Kandola referred to a statement in which Malcolm wrote: ‘I’m very sorry about what happened. It was an accident. I’m very sorry to the family.’

Sean told the court it ‘angered’ him to think about what Malcom put his dad through on the night of the attack. 

He said: ‘My dad did not deserve to die in such a way, he had earned the right to pass away from natural causes in his own silent way.

‘To think that this man felt that he had to attack my dad who was a vulnerable and frail elderly person who would never have been able to fight back. There was nothing of any value in the house as my parents did not have much but they had each other.’

He described his father was a ‘quiet, hard-working, easy-going man,’ adding: ‘He was the man that showed me that hard work, respect, good manners and a good heart would always pay off.’

Reece Lambert, Mr Burke’s grandson, said he believed his grandfather was attacked as he ‘protected the woman he loved with everything he had left’.

He described his grandfather, originally from Dublin, as stoic and quiet with a ‘wicked sense of humour’ and an enduring love for his wife.

Annie Knight married her longtime partner, Henry Brayshaw, on Thursday in an intimate outdoor ceremony on Queensland’s Gold Coast, surrounded by close friends and family.

The 29-year-old adult content creator celebrated her wedding at The Valley Estate, a picturesque nature retreat in Currumbin Valley.

Annie looked radiant in an understated wedding gown featuring a structured bodice, a flowing skirt and an elegant, sweeping train.

She completed the look with a long veil secured to her updo and Jimmy Choo heels.

The bride smiled brightly as she joined Henry at the altar, while he wore a timeless black tuxedo.

Henry paired his white dress shirt with a black bow tie and wore a boutonnière on his lapel that coordinated with Annie’s bouquet.

The couple exchanged vows outdoors with their families present, including Annie’s parents and Henry’s mother and siblings.

Henry became emotional during the vows and was seen wiping tears from his eyes as he spoke to his bride.

Adult star Lily Phillips, who served as one of Annie’s bridesmaids, watched proudly as the couple sealed their marriage with a kiss.

The newlyweds were all smiles when Henry presented Annie with a striking Cartier wedding ring.

Annie’s two Cavoodle dogs also played a part in the ceremony, entering with the assistance of their minders.

Before the wedding, Annie told the Daily Mail that she and Henry had planned the celebration in detail well ahead of time.

The adult star provided a glimpse into how they would be adjusting to post-wedding life. 

‘I will be crying when I read my vows, I wrote them myself, they are five minutes long!’ she said. 

‘We just want it to be the best day. Things will probably go wrong, but that’s life.’

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She continued: ‘We have been living together for a year and a half, so we already feel as though we are married! 

‘The thing that will rock us though is the post-wedding depression. My hen’s party was the best day of my life… once it was done, I was so depressed!

‘The only thing getting me through was I still had the upcoming wedding. Once it is done, I will be like, “I have nothing to look forward to anymore!”

‘But wait until you see the afterparty pics!’

After the wedding, the couple will head off for a short honeymoon.  

‘We have got a honeymoon booked! We thought it would be weird to get married… and then just go back to normal life! So, we are going away for a week,’ Annie said.

She then revealed the reasoning behind holding her wedding ceremony on the unconventional date of Thursday, October 1.

‘There was no significance other than we wanted to have the wedding in the dry season… and it looked like a good date!’ she quipped.

Annie opened up about what steps she was taking to ensure everything ran smoothly on the day.

‘I don’t think anything will go wrong, I have everything down pat, I got the run sheet! If anything goes wrong, it is like, “Well, what am I going to do about it!”,’ she joked. 

Annie also shared that her wedding will be an intimate affair filled with only her and Henry’s closest friends and family, including her good pal, fellow adult star Lily Phillips. 

She said she and Henry had been culling their guest list for some time, adding that only their nearest and dearest would be there.

Henry’s estranged cricket star father James Brayshaw was not invited.  

Annie explained that the family rift is nothing new, revealing Henry is no longer close to his father. 

‘He and Henry haven’t had a relationship for a few years, so it is not a shock to us,’ she said. 

‘To be fair, we didn’t actually send him an invite.’

Annie was quick to add her line of work is not behind the estrangement, noting James has never publicly commented on the situation. 

The couple’s intimate wedding comes after they navigated a difficult chapter in their relationship, including Henry’s gambling addiction, which saw him accumulate significant debt. 

Knight became engaged in March 2025 when Brayshaw got down on one knee during a holiday in Los Angeles. 

In June, Annie revealed their wedding was already set to cost $170,000, with the venue alone accounting for $60,000.  

Dame Esther Rantzen, who died yesterday aged 86, leaves behind a remarkable legacy of compassion, shaped in large part by the charities and causes she championed.

Alongside founding Childline and The Silver Line and campaigning for assisted dying, one of the defining moments of her career was bringing the story of one of the Second World War’s least-known heroes to a global audience.

Nicholas Winton, a modest stockbroker from Hampstead, had kept the secret for nearly half a century when his wife, Grete, discovered a scrapbook in the attic of their Maidenhead home in 1987.

The scrapbook contained the names and photographs of hundreds of children. It soon emerged that, at the age of 29, Nicholas had helped rescue them from Nazi-occupied Prague shortly before the outbreak of war.

Sir Nicholas ultimately helped 669 children, most of them Jewish, flee Czechoslovakia for Britain by train. He also arranged sponsorship and homes for them under a law introduced after Kristallnacht.

In one of television’s most extraordinary scenes, Dame Esther and the That’s Life! team reunited him with many of the people he had saved, as well as the families they later built.

The emotional reunion was recreated in meticulous detail in the 2023 film One Life, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and featuring descendants of those Sir Nicholas helped escape.

Ostensibly a light-hearted consumer affairs programme, That’s Life! balanced comic features involving talented pets and oddly shaped vegetables with investigations into dangerous products, fraudsters and child abuse.

Dame Esther’s lively presence was central to the show’s appeal. She once found herself arrested after encouraging passers-by to try “bat soup” and famously urged Annie Mizen to sample champagne after the charming woman in her 80s told her: “I’m not a drinker.”

Yet one of her most enduring television moments, still widely circulated online, was the reunion between Sir Nicholas—who was finally knighted in 2003—and many of the children he had saved from almost certain extermination.

After finding the scrapbook in 1987, Grete took it to Holocaust historian Elizabeth Maxwell, the wife of newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, hoping that some of the children rescued by Nicholas could be traced.

On February 28, 1988, Maxwell published Sir Nicholas’s story in the Sunday Mirror, describing the children he had saved as “The Lost Children”.

That same day, Dame Esther invited him to appear on That’s Life!—with a surprise waiting for him in the studio.

Sir Nicholas recognised one person in the audience: Rudolf Wessely, a teacher who had travelled out of Prague on one of the Kindertransport trains.

The pair had met at an Abbeyfield Homes meeting in 1987. Sir Nicholas had founded the sheltered housing charity later in life, but that connection was not the reason he had been invited onto the programme.

From the front row, Sir Nicholas asked the woman sitting beside him whether she would change seats with him. She refused—and there was a deeply personal reason why.

The woman was Vera Gissen. In 1939, when she was 11-year-old Vera Diamant, she had been among the children Sir Nicholas helped evacuate from Prague. For years, she had been trying to find the man who saved her life.

‘We did find her name, Vera Diamant, as she was then, on this list,’ Dame Esther said cheerily, adding: ‘Vera Gissen is here with us tonight. Hello Vera.’

The camera panned to Mrs Gissen who – now very much acknowledging the man next to her – turned to Sir Nicholas, grabbed his hand, and pulled him into an embrace as the audience burst into applause. 

Sir Nicholas, visibly stunned, could be seen dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief as Mrs Gissen told him: ‘Thank you.’

‘Hang on to your handkerchief,’ Dame Esther said, before revealing that two more children – Hanusch Schnabl and Milena Fleischmann (better known now as Holocaust awareness campaigner Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines) – were sat next to him as well.

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Addressing a clearly emotional Sir Nicholas, the presenter told him: ‘I know you don’t want thanks, but you’re certainly going to get them.’

The moment turned Nicholas Winton into a national hero. The Daily Mail labelled him ‘Britain’s own Schindler’, after Oskar Schindler, the German who saved the lives of 1,200 Jewish children during the Second World War.

More was to come. On July 3 1988, Sir Nicholas was invited back onto That’s Life! to revisit the segment – and Dame Esther had another sensational surprise primed.

Asking the audience if any of them ‘owes their life to Nicholas Winton’, around two dozen people sat immediately around him in the studio stood up – all children evacuated from Prague thanks to his efforts.

Sir Nicholas flashed a brief grin – then, as he sat down, wiped tears from both eyes.

That it took decades for his understated heroism to come to light is no surprise: not even his wife Grete knew he had travelled to Prague in 1938 at the behest of his friend, Martin Blake, who was working with Czech refugee groups.

Sir Nicholas – known as ‘Nicky’ among his family – spent just three weeks in the city but set in motion part of what became known as the Kindertransport operation that would ultimately rescue 10,000 children from across Nazi-occupied Europe.

He chipped in to cover costs, dealt with the heavy bureaucracy and organisation and,  reportedly, forged travel documents and bribed officials when frustrated by delays.

With assurances given that each child would come with a £50 guarantee (£2,900 now) to cover the costs of repatriation post-conflict, the first train left on March 14 1939, a day before the Nazis fully occupied the country.

Eight would leave in all, with collaborators in Prague including Trevor Chadwick seeing them off before being met by Sir Nicholas and others in London. The children were then settled with willing British families, never to see their own parents again.

What was to be the last train was cancelled by the Nazis on September 1 – the day they invaded Poland and closed all borders. 

Of the 250 children on board, just two are thought to have survived the war, according to an interview Vera Gissing gave in 2006. The failure to get the final train through haunted Sir Nicholas for the rest of his life.

Initially a conscientious objector, he later joined the RAF and, post-war, he worked for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development as the rebuilding of a battle-scarred Europe began.

Then, following a failed bid to run for Maidenhead’s town council, he disappeared into civilian life. Even as he committed himself to charity work, he never mentioned what he considered his unremarkable and ordinary deeds in Prague to anyone.

That was until 1987 – when Grete found the scrapbook and set the ball rolling on what became one of television’s greatest ever moments.

It gave Sir Nicholas the recognition he had long deserved, and Dame Esther would keep in contact with Sir Nicholas regularly, the pair reuniting on screen for ITV documentary Winton’s Children in 2003. He died in 2015, at the age of 106.

She would later reveal her belief that he remained humble about his achievements because he was haunted by the final train that failed to leave Prague.

Speaking on the phone before his That’s Life! appearance, Sir Nicholas had told Dame Esther that he ‘hadn’t saved enough’.

She recalled in 2023: ‘I said, “Why do you say that?”. And he said because there was a last train, it had 250 children on the train… they had closed the border and all those children had to be taken off the train.

‘That moment is reconstructed in this feature film [One Life]. It traumatised Nicky, and I think for him, the memory was of his failure.’

But even now, his legacy endures: a statue of him was erected in Prague Main Train Station in 2009, as a ‘Winton Train’ with descendants of those he saved on board left Prague on the anniversary of what should have been the final train’s escape.

It followed the fateful train’s route across land and sea before a final train brought passengers into Liverpool Street – where Sir Nicholas waited to greet them, as he had some 70 years prior. 

Another statue was erected outside Maidenhead Train Station in 2010, while Sir Nicholas would receive the Czech Republic’s highest honour, the Order of the White Lion, in 2014.

Johnny Flynn and Sir Anthony Hopkins would later play him in One Life, the critically acclaimed biopic that ended with recreations of the That’s Life! reunions.

The film’s epilogue reveals that the audience in its recreation of the show was drawn entirely from the 6,000 people who are alive thanks to his quiet heroism.

Some of those in the audience travelled from Switzerland, France and Romania to England to be in the film, to pay their own touching tribute to a man who wanted no thanks for going above and beyond.