Barney spoke to me about Grace. He said: Mum, you’ll really love her. She’s just like me
A haunting interview with Emma Webber, mother of stabbed Nottingham student Barnaby, that will leave you awestruck by her strength and raging that his killer has, in her words, ‘got away with murder’
THE last text Emma Webber has on her phone from her 19-year-old son Barney was sent on June 10 last year and ends with a rolling eye emoji. They were messaging each other while she watched his younger brother Charlie in a cricket match near their home in Taunton, Somerset. ‘Barney was playing for Nottingham University that afternoon.
‘He told me he’d smashed a 50 and couldn’t wait to play for his local club when he came home for the summer.
‘I said, “Well, you’re going to have to get a job as well, you know.” So his last text to me was, “Yes, yes. Eye roll emoji.”’
But Barney never came home. Three days after that text message was sent, he and his close friend Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both undergraduates finishing their first year at university, were stabbed to death in a vicious, senseless attack as they walked back to their halls of residence after a night out in the early hours of June 13.
Today, Emma tells me that the terrible reality that her ‘brilliant, bright’ son will never again be a part of this warm, vibrant home with father David, 52, brother Charlie, 16, and their two rescue dogs Maggie and Dougie, is ‘slowly kicking in’.
‘But very slowly because sometimes I let myself pretend he’s just at university,’ she says. ‘In the summer, I used to pretend he was just out playing cricket because it gave my brain a rest for a moment. The pain was so physical and visceral.
‘Barney should have been 20 on January 11. I have so much anger now that he’s not here — that his future has been stolen so senselessly, so cruelly.
‘That monster changed our world for ever. The fury I feel for him...’
This week Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, was sentenced to be readmitted to and detained at Ashworth High Security Hospital on Merseyside, where he has been since November, for the manslaughter of Barney, Grace, caretaker Ian Coates, whom he also killed that night, and the attempted murders of three others.
Judge Mr Justice Turner said he would ‘very probably’ remain at the high-security hospital for the rest of his life. But Emma, David, Grace’s parents Sanjoy and Sinead and Ian Coates’ family believe he has ‘got away with murder’.
In an emotional address on the steps of Nottingham Crown Court following the sentencing on Thursday, Emma said: ‘True justice has not been served today. The Crown Prosecution Service did not “consult” with us, as has been reported. Instead, we have been rushed, hastened and railroaded.’
SPEAKING with the dignity that has defined both Grace and Barney’s families throughout the past truly horrendous seven months, she told of how horrified they were when presented with a fait accompli that the CPS had made the decision to accept manslaughter charges in November.
‘At no point during the previous five-and-a-half months were we given any indication that this could conclude in anything other than murder.
‘We trusted in our system — foolishly as it turns out. We do not dispute that the murderer is mentally unwell and had been for a number of years. However the premeditated planning, the collection of lethal weapons, hiding in the shadows and brutality of the attacks are that of an individual who knew exactly what he was doing. He knew entirely that it was wrong but he did it anyway.’ Turning her attention to Nottinghamshire Police’s assistant chief constable Rob Griffin, who publicly admitted there was a warrant out for Calocane’s arrest at the time of the brutal attacks partway through this week’s hearing, she said: ‘I say this to you: You have blood on your hands.’
The warrant was issued in September 2022 after Calocane violently assaulted a police officer. Shockingly, he was never picked up. According to the families, the police had told them he was a ‘sofa surfer’, but it appears he was registered at a Nottingham address for six months before the sickening attacks. ‘If you had just done your jobs properly there’s a very good chance my beautiful boy would be alive today,’ she said.
When Barney’s family finally returned to their Somerset home following a ‘hellish’ three days at the hearing, Emma looked at the photographs of her son in the hallway and ‘my heart broke all over again. ‘If it’s possible we feel even more pain now that we know how truly dreadful the events of that night were.
‘We are drained, exhausted and broken but we now have a fight on our hands to find out what went wrong.’
Barney’s absence is everywhere in this house, right down to the calendar on the kitchen wall that has a column for each family member. Last year there were four names. Now there are three.
Emma and David were at their holiday lodge in north Cornwall when Calocane, who was carrying a rucksack full of knives, hid in the shadows on Ilkeston Road until Barney and Grace, whose mother Sinead is Irish, walked past him at 4am. He began stabbing Barney in the back. When Grace tried to fight Calocane off, he attacked her, too.
‘A part of me feels I should have known [he was being attacked],’ says Emma. ‘It was so brutal. The senior investigating officer said it was the worst violence he’d seen in 29 years of policing.’
Emma was on a video call with work colleagues at 9am when the breakfast news reported a major incident had occurred in Nottingham city centre. ‘It said a man and a woman had been killed. I didn’t think of my son as a man. He’s 19.
He’s my boy. I said to my work colleagues, “Sorry, I’m a bit distracted. There’s something going on in Nottingham. I’m sure it’s all fine. I just want to make sure Barney’s OK.”
WE tried ringing but he didn’t answer. We tried again. Barney is normally good about answering his phone. I thought he was probably a bit hungover, but Dave said, “Let’s have a look [on the Find My Phone app] to see where he is.” The phone wasn’t in his halls. It was on a road we’d never heard of before. We rang it for about five minutes. That’s when I began to worry.’
Emma texted Barney’s friends who confirmed he wasn’t in his room.
‘Almost at that exact moment it came up on the news that the incident had taken place in Ilkeston Road. Dave said, “Barney’s phone is in Ilkeston Road.”
‘My body just went cold. Then his phone started moving. We thought he’d picked it up. We were ringing and ringing but still no one was answering. That’s when we saw it had been taken to the police station.’ Emma falls silent. ‘That was the worst,’ she says. ‘I haven’t looked at that app since.’ When David phoned the police incident line he was told someone would call him back. It was 9.40am. They were frantic. ‘We threw our stuff and the dogs into the car to go to Nottingham. We’d only driven for about four miles when the police called,’ says Emma.
‘You know those words everyone dreads, “Hello, Mr Webber, are you on your own? Who are you with? Are you driving? Are you able to pull over so we can chat?”
‘Your mind starts racing. You still have hope. Maybe he was a witness. Maybe he’s just been injured. We pulled over into a pub car park which is when I heard the words “deceased”, “driving licence” and “Barnaby”.
‘Everything started to go black. I can’t remember if I was sick, but I got out of the car, fell to my knees on the gravel and screamed. Dave was banging and banging the dashboard. I heard the officer say, “You need to go to your wife and make sure she’s OK.” After that everything went still and cold. I was almost devoid of feeling. I didn’t even know how to breathe.’
Emma is sobbing now. I hand her some tissues. It is impossible not to feel her intense pain. She wipes her face and tries to collect herself.
‘I guess the stillness was shock, physical shock,’ she says. ‘We were just stunned. It’s the moment your life has changed for ever — within seconds. Then instincts kick in. We needed to get to Charlie — now.’
Charlie was on a school activities week in Torquay. After speaking to the school — ‘that’s the first time I had to say out loud, “Barney’s been killed,” she says — they began the hour drive.
‘We had to pull over on the way because Dave couldn’t breathe. He got out of the car and started hitting the car bonnet saying, “Not my beautiful boy.”’
With the story breaking on social media, teachers had separated Charlie from his classmates and taken him to a minibus to wait for his mum and dad.
‘I remember so clearly seeing my poor boy on that bus looking so worried and thinking, “I’m going to destroy your life now with what I have to tell you.” God, how...’
We take a break. I tell Emma if this is too painful for her, we can stop, but she won’t. She is determined to ‘do this for Barney’s and Charlie’s sake. She adds: ‘What that monster has done to us, what he’s done to my children — both of them. We had to tell Charlie and it was the most awful thing in the world to watch his face. He couldn’t — wouldn’t — believe it for ages.
‘He was crying and screaming, “He’s not dead. This hasn’t happened to Barney. It wouldn’t. It can’t be true.” I remember him saying that over and over.’
They returned to the family home. ‘My hands shook as I put the key in the door because, as I did it, I thought, “This is the first time we’re coming in here as a family of three.”
‘And, of course, you go in and you’re assaulted by what every family doesn’t even think about day-to-day — including us until that moment — Barney’s shoes, Barney’s coat, Barney’s photographs, his school stuff. He’s there but he’s not there anymore.’ The Webbers are a lovely, sociable family with a wide circle of friends, many of whom rallied around them on that unimaginable afternoon as they waited for Nottingham police to arrive and prepared to travel to the city the following day.
‘Dave and I were awake all night,’ Emma says. ‘We were saying, “This can’t actually have happened to us. How on earth are we ever going to get through this?”
THEN it got to the early hours of the morning. I was looking at my clock thinking, “This time yesterday he was alive. This time yesterday he was walking down the road. This time yesterday he was murdered.”’
Emma says much of what followed the following day is a ‘blur’ as they made the journey from Somerset. She remembers being hugged by the Nottingham chief constable who wept and told her: ‘We’ve got him.’
‘I thought justice would run its course,’ says Emma. ‘Then everything became a flurry. Even now it’s jumbled in my mind. We were told there was going to be a vigil at the university campus. Would we like to be there? When we walked onto the campus I saw a sea of people, literally thousands and thousands and there was silence — the sort of you-can-hear-a-pin-drop silence — and some people were crying. We sat there, in disbelief, just taking it in.’
Grace’s parents, Sanjoy and Sinead, a Dublin-born anaesthetist who is based in London, were also on their way to the vigil, but were held up in traffic and arrived 20 minutes later.
‘When they arrived we hugged each other and wept. Instantly we found this... it’s really hard to explain but the fact we were together was a solace in as much as they know how we are feeling. As families we’re linked for the rest of our lives.
‘Hopefully, we’d have met anyway. Barney spoke to me about Grace. He said, “Mum, you’ll really love her. She’s just like me. We’re so similar.”
‘Grace said the same to her parents. I’ve thought about what might have happened between them in the future and then stopped thinking about it because, in the scheme of things, it doesn’t make a difference now, does it?’
Emma wipes away the tears. ‘I don’t remember much of the vigil at all, although I do remember Sanjoy and Dave decided they wanted to say a few words which weren’t prepared or rehearsed.’
Few of us who watched and heard their generous words of love could help but be humbled by those devastated but dignified fathers as they stood together united in grief. David spoke of how Barney, who was studying history, would be ‘super touched’ by the vigil, adding: ‘His heart will be with you guys for ever and thank you so much.’
Sanjoy agreed as he spoke of his daughter Grace, a gifted hockey player who was studying medicine. ‘The love we have out here, I just wish we had it everywhere so look after each other,’ he said, adding with David’s hand on his shoulder: ‘Grace loved being here and she loved all of you. You all touched her life and hence ours.’
The following day both sets of parents went to see their beloved children in the hospital mortuary.
‘I’ve never been so scared in my entire life,’ says Emma. ‘I nearly didn’t go in, but I did. He looked
like him, but he was very white and very cold, wrapped in some god-awful sheet-like thing.
‘Three of his godparents came in after we’d spent time alone with him. We all circled him and told him we loved him. Then, I kissed him goodbye on his forehead for the last time. I noticed he probably needed a bit of a shave and saw his mole that’s the same as mine.’ She touches her mole beside her lips.
‘I touched his beautiful hair and saw I’d left a little bit of lipstick on his forehead.
‘That image of him is engrained into my retinas and Dave’s. When it creeps in, I try to think about a photograph of Barney on top of a mountain in France last year skiing. He has his Ray-Bans and ski jacket on and looks so alive.’
Barney’s funeral was held on July 14 at Taunton Minster which seated 600 but screens still had to be erected outside for 400 more to pay their respects.
‘I remember ironing his smart pink shirt and chinos for... well, we call it his send-off,’ says Emma. ‘It took such a long time because I thought, “This is the last time I’ll ever iron anything for him.”
‘I put a letter in his coffin, cut off a bit of my hair, sprayed some
I couldn’t see beyond Barney’s loss
perfume on it and put it in too with some of the dogs’ fur.
‘There was a beautiful wooden plaque on the lid with his name on it. So I carved a heart into it and put, “You have my heart forever” because it’s true. The irony is we’d been in that chapel of rest as a family four weeks earlier to say goodbye to Dave’s father. Barney was stood there with us and now he was lying there.’
The following week Emma and David supported Grace’s parents at her funeral in Westminster Cathedral. It was then, says Emma, that she hit ‘my really low point’.
‘The grief was so overwhelming I couldn’t see beyond Barney’s loss. I couldn’t see the point of doing anything other than being with him. The turning point came when I said to Dave, “I think if I’m with Barney then he’s got me and you can have Charlie and Charlie can have you because I don’t think it’s worth me being here.”
‘I felt Barney needed me. That’s when I was put on medication and had some therapy to stabilise me. But...’
She screws the tissue in her hand into a tight ball. ‘We were in utter devastation that summer trying to process it. We didn’t meet with the [Britain’s] Crown Prosecution Service because we couldn’t deal with it. As far as we were concerned this monster was going away for the whole of his life.’
But four days before Calocane was due to appear in court for a pre-trial hearing on November 28, Barney and Grace’s parents were told the CPS had accepted his plea of diminished responsibility. He would not be charged with murder. They were beside themselves.
‘I went cold inside. In that moment of shock you’re not quite sure what you’re hearing.
‘You try to process it but you can’t comprehend it straightaway. You need time. We wanted to see the evidence of how this could be the case.’
The families challenged the decision, demanding another report into Calocane’s mental health. In early December they were invited to the police headquarters in Portishead, Somerset, for a meeting with the team involved in the case and a representative from the CPS. The meeting lasted for six hours.
‘Basically they said they wanted to show us that it was the right decision. Awful as it was, Dave and I wanted to see that he was out of his mind. They showed us stills from hours of CCTV footage from 7.30pm when he left London to 5.30am when he was finally stopped in Nottingham. Those six hours in that room were among the most traumatic ever.
‘I couldn’t even see that monster’s face or hear his name but I had to sit there watching him. He caught a tram with a rucksack of knives, a knife sharpener and an iron bar, bought a sandwich, took £10 out of a cash machine. That was the first time I knew he had a rucksack full of weapons. I’d assumed he was carrying a knife in his pocket and attacked them in a rage. But he was walking to Ilkeston Road very slowly and methodically.
‘What took my breath away was that he went into the shadows and stayed there for ten minutes. This wasn’t a crazed person who was raging, whose eyes were rolling. This was someone who planned his route and hid before attacking my precious son.’
She adds: ‘My emotions were building because I knew what was coming. You know when you’ve watched a film a million times and it’s got a really sad ending and you still hope, even on the 50th time of watching it, that it might actually change and there’s going to be a happy ending?
‘All I could do was look at the timeline, see that it’s 1am, 2am, 3am. I was thinking, “Where are Barney and Grace now? What are they doing?”
‘They had no idea what was coming. Just hearing the name of the road and knowing they were walking towards that monster...
‘When he’d been hiding for ten minutes, I had to leave the room. I knew Barney and Grace were walking down the road at that very moment. I’d made a decision not to see the last seconds my son was alive on this earth. Dave and Sinead left with me. Brave Sanjoy stayed in there.’
Emma now knows that Barney was attacked first, repeatedly stabbed and then, when ‘that monster’ had killed Grace, who had fought desperately to save them both, he returned to her precious son to inflict further wounds. As she says: ‘Neither of them stood a chance.’
The families have also established that, incredibly, there were no toxicology samples taken at the time of his arrest to determine whether he had drugs or alcohol in his system.
In fact, there was no mental health assessment until July, at the defence team’s request. Indeed, Calocane only began receiving medication for his treatment in September and was not moved to a high-security psychiatric hospital until six weeks later. This is where the CPS’s expert doctor assessed him for the first time on November 14 — a full five months after the attacks.
These disturbing facts were confirmed to Emma in an email just four days before this week’s hearing after the families had badgered the police and CPS for months.
The email, which arrived at 3.30pm last Friday from Detective Superintendent Leigh Sanders sent via the family liaison officer, also confirmed a warrant had been issued for Calocane’s arrest in September 2022 but was outstanding at the time of the attacks.
‘That was nine months before Barney and Grace were murdered. I try not to do the “what ifs” and “if onlys” as it just fuels the rage but you can’t help it. Barney was finishing his year and had only gone back to Nottingham for a few cricket matches. If only he hadn’t. He wasn’t planning to go out that Monday night but is very sociable and was convinced by his mates to go. What if he hadn’t? What if it had been raining and he’d used his dad’s credit card for an Uber, which we found out he’d secretly done before? What if the police had arrested that monster months ago?
‘We can’t change what happened, but we can make sure Barney’s memory lives on. A week after his birthday his wonderful cricket club Bishops Hull had a drinks evening for Barney’s foundation.
‘Hundreds of people came. It was bittersweet because the person who would have enjoyed it the most wasn’t there. But we have to try, for Barney’s sake, to change what is going wrong in this country with our mental health care and in our policing and judicial system. It won’t bring Barney back so the sadness and grief will remain, but he will have justice,’ says Emma.
Of one thing she is determined. ‘This will be a happy home again — one in which my beautiful son Charlie will flourish. I owe it to him and to Barney.’
Dave was saying ‘not my beautiful boy’
DONATE to the Barnaby Webber Found-ation at: gofundme.com/f/in-ever lasting-memory-of-barnaby -webber