Neighbour called 999 and said 'I've stabbed them' after killing young married couple

• Listen to 999 call neighbour made after stabbing married couple

A former soldier who killed his neighbours called 999 and said "I went round with a knife, I've stabbed them", a court has heard.

Jurors were played the call at Bristol Crown Court today (10 June), where ex-commando Collin Reeves is on trial for the murder of husband and wife Stephen and Jennifer Chapple.

He climbed over the Somerset couple's fence before stabbing them to death as their children slept upstairs.

The 35-year-old admits manslaughter but denies murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility and is on trial.

Reeves claims he was suffering an abnormality of mental functioning at the time of the killings.

Jennifer, 33, and Stephen, 36, died at their home in Dragon Rise, Norton Fitzwarren, on November 21 last year.

Jurors were played a clip of the defendant’s 999 call made minutes after he attacked them with a ceremonial dagger he was given when he left the army.

The operator at one point mistook Reeves for the injured party, asking him whether he was harmed before he told her: “I went round with a knife, I’ve stabbed both of them.”

Asked whether the couple were awake when he left, he replied: “No, I think they were sort of drifting.

“He was lying on the floor, she was lying on the sofa.”

Reeves had been involved in a long-running dispute with the couple over designated parking on the new-build housing development.

Just 10 days before the killings, Reeves allegedly verbally abused Mrs Chapple outside her house following an earlier exchange between the victim and Reeves’s wife Kayley Reeves.

His mother Lynn Reeves said in a filmed police interview played earlier to jurors that her son is a “closed book” who “never shares his emotions”.

He served in the British Army between 2002 and 2017, including in Afghanistan, but never spoke about what he saw there, she said.

It was claimed Reeves appeared to have been struggling with his mental health since he returned from Afghanistan.

Lynn Reeves wept as she attended court in person to give live evidence on Friday, detailing how she found Reeves “white as a ghost” on the night he killed his neighbours.

She said she had been phoned by a “hysterical” Kayley Reeves saying “they’re dead”.

“He was white as a ghost, he was just white and he just didn’t look like Collin. He was just standing, he just looked right through us as if he wasn’t there and said ‘I had to protect my family’,” she said.

The trial continues.