A 54-year-old Whitechapel man yesterday told an Old Bailey jury that he killed an employee in his local Lidl supermarket by beating him over the head with a can of corned beef after the worker had annoyed him by varying the speed of his floor polishing machine as he approached from behind.
Toby Dell, a gravity die-caster from Commercial Street, told the court.
“I was walking along the fruit and veg aisle when I heard the humming of the polishing machine behind me.
“I immediately became annoyed because I realised that I would have to manoeuvre my trolley to one side of the aisle to allow this individual to get past.
“However, instead of just getting it over with, he kept pushing the machine fairly close and then slowing down again.
“I took this as a deliberate attempt to harass me and turned around to confront the man and have it out with him there and then.
“To my utter fury, he had gone through a gap in the counters and had started polishing the aisle adjacent to the one I was standing in.
“At this point, I lost control. I seized a tin of Newgate, Argentinian corned beef from the shelf and started beating him over the head with it.
“It was never really my intention to kill him even though he had it coming as far as I was concerned.
“In my view, floor cleaning should be done outside of opening hours to spare innocent shoppers from undergoing the kind of trauma I was subjected to.”
Dell was found guilty by unanimous verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serves a minimum of twenty-five years.
As he was led from the dock, Dell struggled with police officers and yelled: “He’s lucky we weren’t in the fresh baked bread area or I’d have shoved his head in the f*****g oven”
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