A coroner is to investigate whether warning signs were missed before a Dartmoor prisoner was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate as they worked together in the kitchens.
Teignmouth man Alex Cusworth, aged 36, was killed by a single knife wound to the back inflicted by convicted murderer William Tolcher, in the unsupervised area of the 200-year-old jail.
They were working together in a food preparation area when Tolcher stabbed him in the back with a ten-inch knife which he was using to cut vegetables.
An inquest into Cusworth’s death has been adjourned by Greater Devon coroner Mr Philip Spinney to allow time for an examination of Tolcher’s mental health records.
Tolcher, aged 54, was serving a life sentence for the murder of a woman in Newquay, Cornwall, in 1996 and had been transferred from Erlestoke in Somerset, a few months before Cusworth was murdered in November 2015.
Mr Spinney has extended the scope of the inquest and delayed its conclusion so that mental health reports from Erlestoke can be obtained and examined by the legal teams representing the prison service and the victim’s family.
He said there may be evidence of a deterioration in Tolcher’s mental health before the transfer took place in September 2015. He had a history of violence towards other inmates and jail staff.
The coroner adjourned the inquest until later in the year and ruled that its scope should be extended back to January 2015 so it will include mental health assessments made before his transfer from Erlestoke to Dartmoor.
At the start of the inquest he told the jury that their task was not to determine civil or criminal liability but to examine the processes within the prison system at the time of the killing.
Cusworth, of Barn Park Terrace, Teignmouth, had just started an eight year sentence for a savage broomstick attack on his landlord.
He had been moved from Exeter Prison to Dartmoor in August 2015 and had been working in the kitchens for almost three months before his killing.
He is the adopted son of former Stafford councillor Ann Edgeller, who told the inquest he was cheerful when she spoke to him a few days before his death.
He had grown up in Staffordshire and moved to Teignmouth in 2011 but become a drug user. He was on a court-ordered drug course of drug rehabilitation when he attacked landlord Patrick O’Reilly with a broomstick.
Tolcher, originally from Liverpool, received a second life sentence after being convicted of Cusworth’s murder by a jury at Plymouth Crown Court in 2016.
He denied even being in the kitchen and claimed he had been ’set up by a Mr Big’ inside the jail.