Paris Wilson answered more questions in the witness box
Paris Wilson attends Plymouth Magistrates’ Court on April 24, 2025 (Image: Carl Eve/PlymouthLive)
A woman accused of working with others to see her ex-husband attacked, frequently broke down in tears in court as she denied wanting to ever cause him harm.
Paris Wilson, aged 35, of The Quay, Plymouth, continued to give evidence in her defence today [March 23] at Winchester Crown Court, where she was asked more questions by her defence barrister Jennifer Knight KC.
Wilson said that Danny Cahalane could be “quite rude” and “used to lie about absolutely everything”, but that he was a “brilliant father” to their daughter, and when the pair of them initially set up their gym, CrossFit Waters Edge, he was dedicated to turning his life around, having left prison for drug offences.
The trial of nine people – seven men from London and two women from Plymouth – has been underway at the court since late January, and several of those accused of involvement in the incident have been giving evidence in their defence.
Seven of the nine, including Wilson, are accused of 38-year-old Danny Cahalane’s murder and an alternative charge of manslaughter.
Lead prosecutor Joanna Martin KC previously told the jury that Danny, who died on May 3, 2025, following an attack at his home in Lipson Road, Plymouth, in the early hours of February 21, 2025, was a “drug dealer in Plymouth who owed a large amount of money to another drug dealer further up the chain of command”.
Danny admitted to police he had also gambled with the profits, including money which was meant to have gone to a drugs boss, named in court as Ryan Kennedy, also known as ‘Frost’.
Danny Cahalane and Paris Wilson(Image: Facebook)
During today’s hearing, his former wife, Paris Wilson, frequently became distressed and cried as she gave answers to a number of questions about her relationship with Danny and the circumstances leading up to an incident outside her home in Oreston on January 19, 2025, the attack at his home in Lipson Road on February 21 and his death ten weeks later in a Bristol hospital.
Wilson said Danny was often “constantly in this negative space of lying, deceiving, being rude, being aggressive, evading things, evading people and not doing good things,” but she felt “hypocritical” as she was now being confronted in court with many of the comments she made towards her former husband, which she accepted were often “horrible”.
She said they had a “turbulent relationship” but that he “really was capable and he was a c****y person, but he also wasn’t – I wanted him to be the person that he could be, and that wasn’t for me it was for [their daughter] and [his son].”
Wilson became very emotional when she spoke of how important Danny was in his daughter’s life, particularly as she was disabled, and added that he was the only other person who understood everything about her and that there was no one else she felt she could share it with other than her ex-husband.
Wilson said that Danny never alluded to her that he did not want to pay Frost, but he had a habit of “just ignoring people”, and it would “irritate me and irritate other people”.
Wilson explained that Frost would message her when he could not reach Danny and would suggest payment plans or offer money to pay off the debt, although she told the jury she did not know the full amount owed for most of the period leading up to the attack.
Wilson said her hope was that Danny would recognise the need to address the issue and “sort it”, which he repeatedly promised to do, while also telling her not to worry about Frost’s threats.
Danny Cahalane(Image: PA)
She highlighted her constant frustration with Danny’s failure to pay maintenance for her daughter’s care, which left her increasingly angry with him.
She also noted that there was a woman in Plymouth whom she named in court as Taylor, who she believed passed on information which may have been given to Frost, where she was living in The Quay, Oreston, after Wilson posted a picture of the view from her window.
She said Frost suggested she help arrange a “link up” with Danny, where the drug boss’s underlings could finally meet with him and sort payment.
However, on that day, January 19, 2025, as Danny dropped off their daughter at a time Wilson had determined, his car was approached by three males, and he sped off.
The jury was reminded of a flurry of messages between Danny and Wilson, where he claimed she had given away the address and the time he would be there, whereupon she blamed him and called him “paranoid”, insisting he was no longer allowed to see their daughter due to the risk he had put both of them in.
Wilson insisted that she believed the meeting was just to arrange payment, and she had no hand in setting up an alleged kidnap attempt, stating that she would have been mortified for her neighbours, her landlord, a family who lived upstairs and the entire local community.
She insisted that when she rounded on him in a message, telling him “don’t bring your s*** here”, she said that none of what happened would have happened if it wasn’t for Danny being in his situation with Frost.
She said she was angry with Danny for involving her in his problem, which affected her and their daughter.
Wilson, referencing how she helped him get a suspended sentence after he was caught by police with a large quantity of cocaine and cash at their home and their gym in 2020, confirmed she angrily wrote to him saying, “I literally save your ass from prison”.
Questioned by her barrister, Jennifer Knight KC, about her feeling angry towards Danny, Wilson admitted it was “how I felt all the time”, but she fervently stated, “I did not set him up to get him hurt, but I told him this [the drug debt and Frost’s constant threats] needs sorting out”.
Despite this anger at Danny, and despite learning that he had initially attempted to arrange for the London underlings to return to her home in Oreston, where he would pay them the following day, she said things soon settled back into a more normal routine, where they would message each other and talk about their daughter.
The Quay, Oreston(Image: Google Street View)
However, while believing the debt had finally been paid, having not heard from Frost in some time, Wilson told the court that Danny had acted strangely, dropping their daughter off at her mother’s home on February 17 and so she re-downloaded Snapchat so that she could ask Frost if there was anything going on, having deleted after events on January 19 in Oreston.
At this point, Frost told Wilson that Danny had “robbed him”. She said he wrote: “He’s robbed me. But it’s cool. Sorted though. Don’t message me again. F*** off”.
She said this was a “completely different” tone from how Frost usually wrote, and told the court that things had “obviously gone very much downhill” between the two men and that the debt was still unpaid.
She admitted she then raged at Danny, telling him he couldn’t have their daughter because she felt it was not safe for her to be with Danny, telling him not to message her and to “drop dead”, because he had failed to sort the entire situation.
She admitted she then sent him a message saying “so I hope you and your butters girl end up with acid in your faces”.
Wilson told the court: “I was being nasty to him, but I know it almost feels impossible to consider that me saying that would be a coincidence.
“Essentially, it’s almost not a coincidence – I had heard that as a threat. I’m not going to deny that. I’d heard Frost threaten Danny with acid or melting him.
“Equally, I heard the threat back from Danny to Frost, along with multiple other threats about shooting him, about stabbing him. I heard threats from Danny about ‘I know where his mum lives, I’ll do this to his mum’.
“Danny would often refer to using ammonia on people, which I know features in Lipson Road – he has a bottle of ammonia there. It’s the threats they would make to each other. So it wasn’t a pure coincidence that I had heard it, so I was just relaying something I had heard. It was nasty, and it was horrible, but that was all I was doing.”
Winchester Crown Court in Hampshire(Image: Corin Messer)
Asked if Frost had told her of his plans to attack her former husband with acid, Paris replied: “I wish he had. To this day I wish Ryan Kennedy had said to me ‘I’m going to throw acid on Danny at this time in this place’ because if he had told me that at the bare minimum [daughter] would not have been in that property, and moreover she would still have a dad and Dan would still be alive and none of us had been here.
“I wish I knew, I wish I knew.”
Despite Danny’s insistence that he would get the situation sorted, that she and her daughter were safe, and that he wanted to continue being their father, her message to him at that time, on February 17, was that he was never to message her again.
She said she blocked Frost on Snapchat after his message and – breaking down in tears in the witness box – Wilson said she did this because Danny had not sorted the situation, and she had no intention of putting their daughter at any risk of being harmed by Frost or his underlings, telling the jury “there’s no way on this earth that I’m going to put [daughter] in a situation where she could get hurt.
“I’m going to put that little girl at risk. Not a chance. It just makes me angry. Because it’s me and my baby who are caught up in this mess. We’ve not had anything, we’ve not gone on holiday – we’ve just had all of this s*** land on our lap.”
After Danny sent further messages attempting to reassure Wilson, defence barrister Jennifer Knight KC asked how this made her feel.
Wilson, her voice rising in pitch and distress in the witness box: “It made me angry with him. I just wish he told somebody.
“I just wish he had said to somebody it was not sorted, that he can’t sort it, and we all could have done something, we could have said ‘right, let’s do it together, let’s go to the police, let’s speak to somebody, let’s figure something out’. But he was just never honest about it, and it makes me angry because he wasn’t.”
She said that in believing Danny, she “felt like an idiot” because “believing Dan’s lies always only ever affected me and my ego.
“He would lie to me – and I know it will end now, but what everyone here seems to forget was that there was a little girl in that house that night. It isn’t just one victim in that house, it was a little girl there.
“When people went to do that to him, she was there, and he told me that she was safe, that she was safe with him, and I believed him, and it makes me angry. All I cared about was [her] safety.”
Wilson said she never found out Danny’s home address until the night police came to her to pick up their daughter at the Lipson Road house.
A brief clip from a police bodyworn video camera showed officers talking to her about the house, and Wilson confirmed that she asked if the attackers had tried to set the house on fire, saying she asked this as, of all the threats that the two men made, “that was the only one I knew was substantial”.
She reiterated that she had not passed on any information about where Danny lived, not least because she did not know where he was living but more importantly she had “no plausible reason that I would put my child’s life at risk” adding that the thought of it was “ridiculous” because there was “no assurance” that her daughter would be safe if such an attack took place.
She said that acid was the “most unsafe weapon” as her disabled daughter could have gone to touch her father after he was attacked, or touch items which were hit with the acid, or even walk on the spilt acid which was strewn around the house. She said that the people accused of attacking Danny with acid could “equally have done it to [their daughter], as she was in the house that night.
Breaking down in tears, Wilson said: “She is totally, totally innocent in all this – it’s a miracle that she is okay.”
Police on Lipson Road(Image: BPM Media)
Asked how she feels about what happened to Danny, she sobbed: “I wish I could have done more because he didn’t deserve any of this. [Our daughter] doesn’t deserve it. [Danny’s son] doesn’t deserve it. And it’s just so… I wish I did know, apparently, what I did know. I wish I knew that.
“It’s so hard to sit there for a year and be accused of knowing something, and thinking ‘I wish – I wish I did, if I knew what you said that I knew none of this would have happened. We would not be in this situation. [Daughter] would not be in this situation.”
Reminded of the video footage of the car in Opie Lane and the screaming sounds captured on the audio track, she was asked if she knew what happened in the house, Wilson again began to cry saying she did not, saying she had asked police for bodyworn video footage from police because due to her daughter’s disabilities, she was unable to tell her anything about that night and what she experienced.
On being asked how it made her feel to know her daughter was in the house that night, Wilson, bitterly sobbing, replied: “I just wanted to jump in the screen and get her”.
Under cross-examination by prosecutor Joanna Martin KC, she confirmed that Danny had previously made a comment about carrying ammonia when he was younger as a weapon.
She was asked about his previous offences in 2009, which saw him handed an eight-year jail sentence in January 2019 at Plymouth Crown Court for conspiracy to supply cocaine and money laundering.
She confirmed she spent a number of nights talking on the phone with him in the latter stages of his prison sentence at HMP Dartmoor, shortly before he was released in May 2015, which was effectively the beginning of their relationship.
She said the phone conversations were “incredibly enjoyable” and that she was “completely infatuated with him”. She admitted that she did “corroborate it through Google”, reading up on a news report about his court hearing.
She confirmed that they were both into CrossFit and that they set up Waters Edge CrossFit in October 2019.
However, she said that the Covid lockdown in 2020 effectively shut down the business, but that there had been an “exodus” of customers following Danny’s arrest in February 2020, after police found cocaine at their Lipson Road address and more cocaine and cash at his gym.
She said that at this stage she had no idea he had returned to his former life dealing drugs, but he had claimed that he had “felt like he was under pressure”, that he was not as good a trainer as he thought, and he had fallen back into that world “as it was easy money”.
Police on scene guard following acid attack incident in Lipson Road, Plymouth(Image: Carl Eve/PlymouthLive)
Despite this, they married in October 2020 in London, with Wilson explaining that they were convinced he would be returned to prison, so they decided to wed.
Asked why, she said she was “utterly besotted with him – he was a wonderful father”, and she wanted to show she was committed to him to work things out.
She also stated that when their home was burgled in May 2022, she had “no idea” he was storing drugs and money in their loft, which had been taken by the burglars.
She said Danny later confirmed that around £80,000 had been taken and the drugs were around half a kilo of cocaine, but did not tell her who it belonged to.
She admitted that for “self-preservation reasons” she did not focus on what he was doing as she was a full-time mum during lockdown, and shortly afterwards, A friend and Danny Kennedy, Frost’s brother, ostensibly visited to find out who had taken the drugs and cash.
In answer to more questions, she accepted that by May 2022, they were living a relatively decent life during lockdown, due to his drug dealing.
She said: “I’ll be completely frank, during lockdown I was content to turn a blind eye” to Danny’s drug dealing.
She said afterwards he was frequently out just looking for who had robbed him, but she then learned he was seeing another woman called Tanisha, and by this stage, he moved out of the marital home.
While he was staying at an Airbnb in West Hoe in August 2022, he was again robbed.
The court heard Danny later turned up at her doorstep “white as a ghost” to tell her he had three kilos of cocaine stolen from him, which she said she only learned much later belonged to Frost.
A total of nine defendants – seven men from London and two women from Plymouth – remain on trial, with seven of these accused of Mr Cahalane’s murder and an alternative charge of manslaughter, on May 3, 2025.
They are Paris Wilson, 35, of The Quay, Plymouth; Jude Hill, 43, of Wantage Gardens, Plymouth; Abdulrasheed Adedoja, 23, of Neasden, London; Ramarnee Bakas-Sithole, 23, of Islington, London; Israel Augustus, aged 26, of Tottenham, London; Isanah Sungum, 22, of Edmonton, London; and Brian Kalemba, 23, of Barking, London.
Five of the defendants are charged with the attempted kidnapping of Mr Cahalane on January 19 2025, at The Quay in Oreston, Plymouth. They are Adedoja, Bakas-Sithole and Wilson, along with Jean Mukuna, 23, and Arrone Mukuna, 25, both of Camden, London.
All – except for Jude Hill – are also charged with participating in criminal activities of an organised crime group, namely the supply of drugs, including the enforcement of drug debts and profiting from the supply of drugs, in which Ryan Kennedy played a leading role.
All nine deny the charges.
Kelvin Asante, aged 23 and of Eresby Place, London, appeared at Plymouth Magistrates’ Court on January 20 following his arrest on January 19 this year. He was charged with murder and participating in the criminal activities of an organised crime group.
He appeared at Winchester Crown Court via video link on January 21 and was remanded into custody. He appeared for a plea and trial preparation hearing on April 1, ahead of trial dates of either August 3 or October 19 at the same court.
The trial continues.
