I KILLED MY DAD
WOMAN SNAPPED AND STRUCK 87-YEAR-OLD WITH A SHOVEL THEN BURIED HIM IN GARDEN
BARBARA Coombes was gardening when she snapped.
She picked up the shovel she had been using in the garden, walked into the living room, and then smashed it over the back of her frail father’s head as he stood.
When the dazed 87-year-old turned towards her, she struck him a second time, before using the blade of the shovel to slit his throat.
Then, she watched as the father she had grown to loathe bled to death in front of her eyes.
It was an appalling crime, with an appalling trigger, Manchester Crown Court heard yesterday morning.
The event that caused her to be overcome – by what she would later describe as a ‘black cloud’ – was said to have been the discovery of a box. And, inside it, were photos which triggered the most painful memories.
Confronted with indecent images of herself as a child, Barbara Coombes, then in her 50s, recalled how her father Kenneth Coombes had molested her, it was said in court. It was claimed that for over 40 years she was his ‘sex slave’.
Kenneth Coombes, who had served in the RAF in World War II, is of course not here to defend himself against those allegations. He died right there in the living room of the house.
Precisely what his daughter felt at that moment has never been made clear. Whatever emotions she felt, these were soon put aside as she set about concealing an horrific crime.
She managed to roll her dead father up in a carpet, clean up the blood and drag his corpse into the back garden of his semi-detached home at Matlock Road, Reddish in Stockport.
Then, the next day, she ordered a tonne of soil to cover the makeshift grave, spinning a web of lies to conceal the truth of her crime from her family.
She told her family that he had died suddenly from a heart condition. Her brother was informed of the death in a hand-written note she posted through his letterbox. Her dad, she insisted, had been taken to hospital and was later cremated. He wouldn’t have wanted ‘the fuss’ of a funeral, she said.
While the family knew he was dead, although not how, the authorities believed Kenneth was alive. The dark truth of his real fate would remain a secret Barbara Coombes would keep to herself for 12 years.
While her father was still alive, she had married – but she moved back into the home on Matlock Road when the marriage ended, despite the abuse she was said to have suffered there. And after his death, despite the body decaying under a tree in the back garden, she continued to live there.
She slept in a back bedroom, just a few metres from her father’s secret grave. She fraudulently cashed his pension and also a carer’s allowance, handouts which totalled almost £190,000 over the years.
She continued to open her father’s correspondence, even replying in his name. His dentist was told he didn’t want any appointments and his GP, urging him to have the flu vaccine, was also rebuffed.
Years later Ms Coombes’ family tried to lay her hands on her grandfather’s death certificate, but of course it didn’t exist. They even asked Coombes whether she had killed him, accidentally, but Ms Coombes put on a show of being affronted and asked how she could possibly pose such an awful question.
Barbara Coombes skilfully kept the authorities in the dark while fellow residents at Matlock Road knew only that Kenneth had ‘just disappeared’.
Terry Sever, 70, recalled how strict Kenneth was with his family and told the M.E.N: “If he wanted to watch something on television, she used to have to go out of the room. He was very strict. To my knowledge this man Kenneth just disappeared. I was not that friendly to ask where he went. I just did not see him anymore.”
Barbara Coombes’ crime began to unravel in the winter of 2017.
A housing association officer organised a ‘winter wellness’ visit for Mr Coombes, who would then have been 99 were he still alive.
Barbara tried to bluff her way out of it but a date was set.
On January 7 this year, the day before the meeting was scheduled to take place, she walked into Cheadle Heath police station and made a confession which must have shocked detectives: “I murdered my father 12 years ago.”
She was interviewed by police and then gave a prepared statement in which she said she had been ‘subjected to physical violence from my father from a young age’.
She said she witnessed her father assaulting her mother on many occasions, and if she tried to intervene he would tell her to mind her own business.
On the day she killed her father, he had told Ms Coombes to do some gardening and when she went back inside the home she was said to have found those shocking indecent images on the dining table.
“I felt utterly disgusted and mortified,” she said in a prepared statement.
She added: “I could feel a black cloud appearing over me.
“In a haze of disgust and disbelief I picked up a shovel I had been gardening with and walked into the living room where my father was standing.”
The disbelieving residents of Matlock Road watched as police forensics experts began to dig up the back garden.
The body of Kenneth Coombes was uncovered and Barbara Coombes was charged with murder. She was calm and unemotional when she appeared in the dock at Manchester Crown Court yesterday, where she was jailed for nine years. She had pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility at an earlier hearing. The Crown decided not to pursue the murder charge. She also admitted preventing a lawful burial and fraud.
Defending, Martin Heslop QC said: “This has to be one of the most tragic cases to come to the courts. This now 63-year-old lady of previous good character killed her father following 40 years of extreme sexual, mental and physical abuse at his hand.”
He said Ms Coombes was raped by her father on ‘hundreds of occasions’ and that her father ‘treated her in effect as his sex slave for 40 years’.
He may have even fathered a child with her, David, who died days after being born, the court heard.
The QC said on the day she killed her father, Ms Coombes came into the house after doing some gardening and saw a box of pictures, including explicit photographs of her.
“As a result it’s clear she finally snapped,” Mr Heslop said.
Michelle Colborne, for the prosecution, said Ms Coombes had suffered ‘a lifetime of abuse, verbal, physical and potentially sexual’.
Sentencing, Mr Justice Timothy King said he accepted that the impact of the abuse she claims to have suffered at her father’s hands was ‘ devastating’, but said although that could explain the killing, it could not excuse it.
After sending down Ms Coombes for nine years, he said: “Some may think that wholly inadequate, others might say it’s far too much given the history of abuse. I have no doubt in the round it is an appropriate sentence.”