Mother of murdered Kelly Ann laments her ‘fast life’

Clarke’s nude body was found by a passer-by in some bushes along the Guapo/Cap-De-Ville Main Road, at the back of a hardware store. Her face was bruised and bloody and she was frothing at the mouth. Her clothes, also covered in blood, were found near her body. Police were working on the theory that she had been sexually assaulted, killed and her body dumped in the bushes.

Though visibly upset, Clarke’s mother Francesca Shade told Newsday her daughter was “hardened” and did not like to listen to her advice.

“She was a nice girl but she never liked to listen to me,” Shade said.

“She only liked to smoke weed and lime with bad company.” Clarke lived with her father in San Juan for a number of years after he and Shade separated. However she eventually asked to live with her mother in Belmont.

Shade told Newsday that for a number of years Clarke was acting out against her, then one day she left altogether.

“She just take up her clothes and leave and gone. She went to live with a man in Point, then she went to live with another man who was also from Point. Last month she was in the hospital in San Fernando. I begged her to take her clothes and come back home, but she said that she did not want to go.” A pathologist at the Forensic Science Centre in St James yesterday determined that Clarke was beaten to death with a piece of wood. The beating was so brutal that her face was crushed. Police also found a piece of wood at the scene with blood on it.

The pathologist found no evidence of sexual assault. The murder toll for the year now stands at 266.