A St Catherine man who is serving concurrent life sentences for two murders, one committed in 2009 and the other in 2010, has lost his bid to appeal his convictions before the United Kingdom Privy Council but has been given leave to have his case returned to the appeal court here so he can challenge his prison term.

Rayon Williams, who was sentenced to life with eligibility for parole after 35 years for the first murder and life with eligibility for parole after 45 years for the second, had sought leave to appeal both convictions before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council after the Appeal Court here turned him down following separate appeals.

On Tuesday, March 10, 2026 the Privy Council indicated that it had granted permission to appeal the sentence, but refused permission to challenge the convictions “on the ground that it is not arguable that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice”.

In effect, the matter will now be satellited back to Jamaica’s Court of Appeal for it to address the sentence.

Williams was initially convicted in March 2013 after a jury trial in the St Catherine Circuit Court and sentenced to imprisonment for life at hard labour, with a stipulation that he should serve 35 years before becoming eligible for parole for the September 2009 murder of Hugh Cover.

Evidence led during the original trial in which an aunt of Williams was the sole eyewitness and chief witness for the Crown, said that sometime around midnight on the night in question in a yard at Oxford Road, Redemption Ground, in St Catherine, she saw Williams and several other men surrounding Cover who was seated on a metal pan.

She said one of the men picked up a pickaxe stick and hit Cover in the back of his head four times, whereupon he fell to the ground, “flattering like foul”. She said that on Williams’ instructions, Cover was then turned onto his belly, at which point Williams then took up a sword, which was “leaning up in a corner”, and used it to cut Cover’s neck.

She said she next heard a gushing sound, “like water running very hard”, and saw blood flowing from Cover’s throat, at which point her nephew directed one of the other men to “finish take off the head”.

That severed head and body were then placed in a motor car which belonged to the dead man and driven to the Braeton area of St Catherine by an individual who abandoned the car with the corpse under “a big guango tree” on the Braeton main road.

Police subsequently found the car parked on a dirt road in the Cumberland Housing Scheme area. Cover’s headless body was found lying on its back in the trunk of the car, and his head was found wrapped in material in a bag.

Williams, in an unsworn statement from the dock during the trial, denied any knowledge of the incident and claimed that his aunt was lying out of malice towards him, saying that she had previously threatened to send him to prison because she believed that he had stolen a gun which belonged to her.

Williams appealed the sentence, but it was dismissed in May 2017.

In the second murder, Williams was convicted in June 2014 after a jury trial and sentenced to imprisonment for life at hard labour, with the stipulation that he serves 50 years before becoming eligible for parole. It was further ordered that this sentence should run concurrently with the sentence he was then serving.

But in July 2022 the Appeal Court, while upholding Williams’ conviction, allowed the appeal against his sentence, setting aside the stipulation that he serve 50 years before becoming eligible for parole and substituting it for 45 years’ imprisonment before becoming eligible for conditional supervised release.

The case for the prosecution in that murder was that Williams, in December 2010, shot and injured Geraldo Campbell in a shop on Oxford Road, Spanish Town, St Catherine. Campbell died at Spanish Town Hospital while undergoing treatment.

The prosecution’s main witness was again Williams’ aunt, who said she was selling Christmas lights on the night in question when she saw her nephew and another man approaching. She said her nephew broke ranks with the other man, walked to the doorway of the shop, pulled a firearm, pushed his hand with the firearm inside the shop and fired. Campbell, whom she knew as “Al”, was later found with gunshot wounds.

During the trial, all the aunt’s assertions about being an eyewitness to the murder were squarely challenged. In essence, the suggestions to her were that her evidence was a fabrication and she was motivated by ill will to testify falsely against her relative.

During the appeal for this murder, Williams’ attorneys, in an application to adduce fresh evidence, produced an affidavit sworn to by his aunt in 2018, about four years after the conviction, in which she recanted, saying, among other things, that the evidence she gave at the trial was not true and that she had given false evidence because she was pressured by the police to do so.

She said she did not see her nephew shoot and kill Campbell. The Crown at the time opposed that application and sought to adduce its own fresh evidence in a repudiation affidavit filed by the aunt in 2021 in which she denied that the retraction was voluntary and genuine. She claimed that she had been forced by her nephew and his agents, including family members, to retract her testimony which she gave at trial.

Her nephew filed further applications for the admission of additional fresh evidence, claiming that his aunt, in a letter which she supposedly wrote and signed, said her testimony was given under duress from the police who she feared because they had killed her two sons and that she was “now a child of God” and needed to confess. She gave no reason as to why she waited so long to give that information.

In another letter produced by the defence, purportedly written by the aunt to a family member, she said a policeman conspired with her to fabricate her evidence, telling her to say that her nephew did the shooting because “the police did not like him because he was an area leader and they wanted to get him off the streets”. The Crown, in further evidence, repudiated the additional evidence of the defence.

Williams took his appeal to the Privy Council, asking it to determine whether, among other things, the trial judge had failed to direct the jury that his aunt’s evidence was tainted by improper motive and contradicted the expert medical evidence, and whether the Court of Appeal erred in finding that the trial judge’s failure to issue a good character direction and the inadequate identification directions did not amount to a miscarriage of justice, as well as other issues.