'All I wanted was for him to kiss me one last time, but there was nothing'
“THERE was a chair next to him but I just kind of collapsed on top of him. I remember him being cold and hard.
“I kept wiping his eyebrows, stroking his face and saying ‘I can’t believe you are here’. I told him he looked beautiful and I just couldn’t stop touching him.
“I don’t know why but I was expecting him to squeeze my hand, open his eyes or hear his heartbeat when I had my head on his chest.
“I kissed him and all I wanted was for him to kiss me back, just one last time, but there was nothing.”
Tears stream down Leanne Bird’s cheeks as she recalls the moment she said goodbye to her boyfriend, Connor Upton, after he was stabbed to death outside a Burton nightclub.
The final farewell could hardly have been in starker contrast to the hours the 24-year-old spent with the love of her life on the morning before his death.
The couple were in the pub when he got down on one knee in front of everyone to ask Leanne to marry him.
“I said yes. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I loved him,” said Leanne.
Later that day the couple had an argument on their way home so Connor headed into town while Leanne stayed in with a friend.
Connor texted Leanne saying he loved her and that he wanted to sort things out in the morning.
She said: “I was expecting him to come back to mine after town like he sometimes did when he’d been out, but the bang on my door in the early hours of the morning wasn’t him, it was my mum and his sisters to break the news that he’d been stabbed.
“I didn’t know what to think. I was in a panic, in disbelief and pure shock.
“I was also angry he’d been in Merlin’s because I didn’t like him going there and we used to argue when he did.”
Connor had already been in hospital for a few hours by the time Leanne arrived and he died shortly after she saw him.
“The first thing I saw was the stab wound on his chest. It was only small. I held his hand but I didn’t know what to say. I asked if he was all right but obviously he wasn’t.
“He kept saying ‘I love you’ and ‘tell the girls that daddy loves them’. I felt so helpless.
“I was in the room on my own with him for about five minutes and I remember it being really hot and my head was spinning.
“I gave him a hug and told him I loved him.
“He told the nurses he felt sick and then he started to heave so they lay him on his side to try to make him more comfortable.
“I kept telling him he would be OK.
“I left the room to be sick myself. It wasn’t seeing him like that which made me sick, it was the heat and everything that was going on.”
“It was surreal. The feeling when I was told that news was something I will never forget,” she said.
“I remember looking at his mum who’d collapsed on the floor. I couldn’t take it in.
“I went back in to see him and he was just lying there — dead.
“We were not allowed to touch him as he was now evidence but I kissed him. I wanted to lie with him and I didn’t want to leave him. It was traumatic.”
Leanne described the next few days as ‘a bit of blur’ but the tragedy started to sink in when she went to see Connor’s body at Stafford Hospital.
The day after, Leanne heard the news that his killer, George Lawrence, had handed himself in and said all she wanted to do was see him to ask why he had murdered the father of her children.
“I wanted my questions answering. I had so many thoughts going round and round in my head.
“I felt hatred for Lawrence like I have never felt hatred before, but then hatred turned into anger. He had taken my kids’ dad away forever.
“He had kids the same age as Connor but they can still visit him in prison if they want to. We can’t ever see Connor again — that’s the difference.
“When Lawrence was sentenced to life it wasn’t like a sigh of relief — I was still thinking ‘he has murdered my fiance’. I felt empty and numb.
“Although justice had been served it was never going to bring Connor back.”
