Man who killed father cannot add ‘beloved’ to his headstone

A MAN who murdered his father before burying him in his back garden has been told he cannot add the word “beloved” to his headstone.

Mark Alexander is serving at least 16 years of a life sentence for the September 2009 killing of his father, Samuel.

His application to a church court to have the prefix “beloved” inserted into a space before the phrase “Father, teacher, linguist”, was supported by his mother and his father’s two sisters.

But the move was opposed by the Rev Simon Faulks, John Preston, the churchwarden, and two parishioners in Drayton Parlsow, Bucks, amid concerns it would “re-open past wounds”.

Handing down judgment at Oxford Consistory Court, the Rev Alexander Mcgregor said it was “not possible for the court to know whether [Alexander] loved his father or whether he loves him now. It is, as [Alexander] says, no doubt possible for someone to love the person he has killed.”

Alexander was 22 and studying English and French at King’s College, London, when he killed his father, a retired lecturer described during the trial as “cantankerous” and “boorish”.

He had long resented his father’s “bullying behaviour”, which included refusing to let him have a girlfriend, and was believed to have lived “in fear” of the controlling 70-year-old.

Alexander was convicted at Reading Crown Court in 2010 of killing his father, attempting to burn parts of the body, then burying it under three layers of mortar, a layer of commercial cement and “a great deal of soil”.

Mr Faulks said allowing Alexander to amend his father’s grave was “at odds with the way in which he treated his father’s body”.

It would, he added, be “an affront and an offence to the parishioners at large”, to do otherwise.