Bludgeoned to death by her Jehovah’s Witness builder
Gran, 58, killed with hammer after she said work was slow
‘Tormented by what she endured’
A BUILDER bludgeoned a woman to complaints death in her over home an extension following which was still being worked on 14 months after it should have been completed.
Peter Norgrove, 43, then whistled as he packed away his tools and left Sharon Gordon dying. That evening the Jehovah’s Witness led an online service for worshippers at his local Kingdom Hall.
Grandmother Ms Gordon had been introduced to Norgrove – who had recently retrained as a builder – by a friend at church, and commissioned him to build a £29,000 ground-floor extension after he successfully carried out fencing work for her.
But a job that he estimated would take between four and six weeks ended up taking 15 months, and was still not finished when he finally killed her, a judge was told yesterday.
Norgrove took a lump hammer and gloves to the property in Dudley, West Midlands, which he put on before the killing last July.
Ms Gordon, 58, received at least eight blows to the head in what a judge described as a ‘brutal and savage attack’ at the foot of her staircase.
In a heartbreaking victim impact statement, Ms Gordon’s daughter, Rhian Brown, said her mother’s murder in ‘horrific circumstances’ had left her an orphan – after her father died after contracting coronavirus.
Ms Brown said: ‘I’m tormented by what my mother would have endured. I wonder when she realised she was in danger. I wonder what he said to her as he repeatedly struck her with tools that should have been used to make her feel more safe and secure in her home. ‘These thoughts are torture but I can’t get them out of my head.’ Norgrove’s movements outside the house that day were caught on doorbell and home security cameras at his victim’s property. The footage shows him placing a bucket – containing the hammer – on the patio before working on an internal door.
Just after 2pm, he is seen donning a pair of red gloves and going through the back door. Seconds later, the doorbell camera picked up banging sounds, screams for 18 seconds and shouting, as Ms Gordon, an accounts assistant, was attacked. Around 20 minutes later, Norgrove emerges outside the house – a blood stain visible on his right trouser leg – and is filmed casually packing up his car, whistling as he does so.
Following the killing, Norgrove drove home and put his clothes in the washing machine before going to collect his daughter from school, arriving late.
He then drove to his mother-inlaw’s home and dumped the hammer in a shed and the bloodied gloves and cloths in a bin beside the outbuilding.
Ms Gordon’s body was discovered by her best friend the following day, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.
Norgrove, who admitted murder at a hearing in December, was jailed for life yesterday, with a minimum term of 15 years.
The court was told the side-extension got off to a bad start when Norgrove struggled to secure a digger, meaning he ended up having to dig some of the foundations out by hand. In an entry on May 3, 2022, almost a month after work started, Ms Gordon noted on her calendar: ‘ Peter arrived late today, then popped out so it was never going to get done today.’
The job was delayed by Norgrove’s ‘lax timekeeping’, short working days and inclement weather, while work was also halted on two occasions to satisfy a requirement for building inspectors to check on the project.
Prosecutor Earl Pinnock said that as the months went on it was ‘clear there was a steady reduction in her trust and confidence in him’, and the ‘pattern of irregular attendance, dissatisfaction and mutual distrust continued into the summer’.
Just over a fortnight before Norgrove killed her, the court heard
‘Pattern of mutual distrust’
Ms Gordon sent him a long WhatsApp message ‘ lamenting the amount of time he had been taking’ on the extension’, which she attributed in a large part to his ‘lax timekeeping.’
After killing the mother-of-one, Norgrove went home and carried on his family life as normal. That evening, he went to the Dudley Kingdom Hall with his wife and three children, and led a service for those dialling in on Zoom.
The court heard Ms Gordon was also a Jehovah’s Witness and belonged to the same fellowship, although the two had not crossed paths in the church. A post-mortem examination found Ms Gordon may have taken an hour to die of traumatic brain injuries.
Balbir Singh, defending, said Norgrove, of Sedgley, Dudley, who had no previous convictions, was ‘full of regret and remorse’.
The court heard that the defendant’s wife Rebecca, 43, was standing by him.
public events in his constituency. Last month’s arson attack in north London was ‘the final straw’. An email sent after the attack informed him he was ‘the kind of person who deserved to be set alight’.
The incident led to ‘tense’ conversations with family members over Christmas, before he decided he would step down.
Mr Freer said quitting politics would be ‘a real wrench’, but added: ‘Obviously your husband or your family’s views have to carry a lot of weight. And when someone worries that, “are you going to come home at night”, you have to take that seriously.’
He said all MPs sadly had to accept a certain level of abuse as ‘par for the course’ in modern public life. But he added: ‘You shouldn’t really have to think, am I going to survive the day?’
Mr Freer’s decision will lead to fresh questions about security for MPs, who have faced increased threats in recent years. It may also reignite the debate about the toxic influence of social media on public life.
In the past decade, Sir David and Labour MP Jo Cox were murdered in their constituencies. Labour’s Stephen Timms was stabbed by an Al Qaeda sympathiser in 2010 but survived.
Mr Freer said he suffered his first serious death threat the following year, when the group Muslims Against Crusades told him to ‘let Stephen Timms be a warning to you’ and urged supporters to target him. A dozen supporters of the group then burst into an event he was holding at North Finchley mosque, with one calling him a ‘Jewish homosexual pig’ who was ‘defiling the house of Allah’.
In the intervening years he has suffered numerous threats, including abusive notes left on his car and fake petrol bombs placed on the doorstep of his constituency office.
Since the murder of Sir David, Mr Freer’s husband has taken to insisting that he is picked up
‘Defiling the house of Allah’
from the Tube station and is reluctant to let him walk the streets on his own.
Mr Freer is not Jewish but believes his outspoken views on Israel and strong support for the Jewish community have led to him being targeted by anti-Semites. He narrowly avoided encountering Ali outside his constituency office in 2021 after being called in to Westminster by Boris Johnson to be promoted to a new job during a government reshuffle.
He said: ‘Who knows what would have happened? Would he have attacked me? If he did attack, would I have survived?
‘Given what he did to David, I think it’s unlikely he wouldn’t have attacked me and I think it’s unlikely that I would have survived that kind of frenzied attack. That’s luck.’
Mr Freer is scathing about the impact of social media on public life saying that sites such as X/Twitter and Facebook had ‘an awful lot to answer for’.
He quit Twitter six years ago following an online spat with George Galloway, which ended up with one of the firebrand former Labour MPs supporters sending Mr Freer a picture of himself mocked up as a concentration camp victim.
He is also highly critical of Jeremy Corbyn, saying the former Labour leader ‘let the cork out of the bottle – he made antiSemitism respectable again’.
Mr Freer, whose constituency is home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the country, says the October 7 attacks on Israel by terror group Hamas had led to an upsurge in anti-Semitism.
With major pro-Palestine demonstrations taking place in central London most Saturdays, he says many of his constituents ‘won’t come into central London at all’ on those days because of the risk of intimidation and abuse.
Mr Freer is the latest of dozens of MPs to announce they will quit Parliament at the next election.
But, unlike most, polls suggest he would have held his seat. And he is clear that he has no truck with plotters trying to undermine Mr Sunak.
‘This is very much driven by personal circumstances,’ he said. ‘It is not a reflection on the Prime Minister, it is not a reflection on the Government. I still believe the Prime Minister can win.’
AN MP’s constituency surgery is the oil that keeps democracy’s wheels turning. It is where voters can raise issues and injustices – from new housing developments to hospital closures.
But recently politics has become a matter of life and death – literally. Two MPs have been murdered in their constituencies.
So who could blame Tory minister Mike Freer for deciding to quit Parliament after being subjected to death threats? The final straw was his Golders Green office suffering an arson attack in December.
While not Jewish, he believes his strong pro-Israel views have led to him being targeted by anti-Semites. In a depressing indictment of the growing dangers of his job, Mr Freer says: ‘You shouldn’t have to think, “Am I going to survive the day?’’’
Sir Keir Starmer deserves credit for striving to root anti-Semitism out of the Labour Party, but too many activists still have scant sympathy for the Jewish community.
And when the police tolerate Hamas sympathisers chanting for the destruction of Israel, is it a surprise protesters have been emboldened to become more aggressive?
Political discourse has always been robust. But in recent years intolerance has made possessing different opinions, in some quarters, not so much difficult, as dangerous.
For a functioning 21st-century democracy, this is positively unhealthy.