A “most peculiar” crime: the Mansfield murders
In 1998, Pat and William Wycherley were shot dead at their home in Mansfield. Their bodies lay undiscovered in a garden for 15 years. Ahead of a new TV series about the murders, Gordon Rayner reports on a most unusual crime
Sue Bramley nods at the spot in her garden where the skeletal remains of her house’s previous occupants were discovered, and recalls the words of a workman sent by police to rebuild her patio. “He told me, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll have forgotten about it in 12 months.’ But that was eight years ago, and I will never forget it as long as I live.”
She remembers the sniffer dogs zeroing in on a patch of earth outside her back door. She remembers the police officers finding bones and bullets, 3ft down. She remembers having to explain to her 15-year-old daughter that a man and a woman had been shot dead in the front bedroom of their home. And just in case her memory were to fade, she has constant reminders of the horrors that went on there, from the taxi drivers who mention it when they collect her, to the rubber-neckers who still drive into the cul-de-sac to stare at the house.
When the Bramleys started renting the property in 2006, neither they nor anyone else in the community had any idea that it was the scene of one of the most peculiar murders in recent criminal history. Until 2005, the house was being tended by Susan and Christopher Edwards, a couple who murdered Susan’s reclusive parents, Bill and Pat Wycherley, in 1998, dumped their bodies in a tiny pit in the garden, and then spent the next 15 years pretending the Wycherleys were still alive so they could help themselves to their savings, pensions and property.
The truth about what really happened to the Wycherleys emerged in 2013, when the Edwardses were arrested following a tip-off from a suspicious relative. Both are now serving life sentences for double murder. But next week, Bramley and the community of Forest Town, in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, will have yet another reminder of the murders when Sky airs Landscapers, a drama about the case starring Olivia Colman and David Thewlis as the Edwardses. The real Edwardses have been behind bars for seven years, but the murders have cast a long shadow over Forest Town. In Blenheim Close, the street where the shootings happened, the residents were hoping its notoriety was starting to wear off, only for the four-part drama to dredge it back to the surface.
The facts of the case are these. Christopher Edwards, who came from a family of academics and worked as a credit controller for a copywriting firm in London, met Susan Wycherley through a dating agency. After they married in 1983, Susan, a former librarian, gave up work and settled into the role of housewife.
They were completely self-contained, did not socialise or go out for meals, but there was one thing they did like to spend money on, and it was a large part of the reason they decided to murder the Wycherleys. Behind the door of their pokey one-bed council flat in Dagenham, east London, they lived out the shared fantasies of two people obsessed with celebrity.
Their hobby was to buy signed photographs and other memorabilia of Hollywood greats, spending their evenings poring over trinkets they could ill afford. For 14 years, Susan kept up a make-believe correspondence with the actor Gérard Depardieu, telling her husband they were pen pals, when in truth she had been writing to herself in broken English, even buying a franking machine to make it seem as though the envelopes had come from France.
They spent at least £14,000 on mementos of Gary Cooper, and £20,000 on a signed photograph of Frank Sinatra. Other favourites were Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Christopher Edwards, a military history buff, would buy first editions of books by Churchill and de Gaulle. Living way beyond their means, they wanted to find a way to clear their debts and carry on spending. They settled on a plan to murder Susan’s parents, Bill, 85, and Pat, 63, reckoning that no one would notice they had disappeared because they, too, were loners.
“Behind the door of their pokey council flat, the Edwardses lived out the shared fantasies
of two people obsessed with celebrity”
The closest that neighbours in Mansfield can come to describing Susan’s parents is that they both smoked, that Bill sometimes played the organ in his front room, and that Pat walked several paces behind her husband when they went out. Their anonymity made them perfect victims.
So on a May bank holiday in 1998, the Edwardses took a train to Mansfield, where former gun club member Christopher shot Pat and Bill twice in the chest. The gun, a Second World War .38 calibre revolver, is thought to have been one Christopher illegally owned. Remarkably, no one heard the shots, not even the occupants of the adjacent semi, and when a neighbour saw Christopher, then aged 41, digging a hole up to his waist in the garden in the middle of the night, they did not think it suspicious enough to call the police. After burying the couple, Christopher planted shrubs on top of the earth mound.
The couple wasted no time in pocketing the Wycherleys’ money; Susan Edwards, then aged 39, went to a branch of the Halifax on
the Tuesday after the bank holiday and used forged documents to open a joint account in herself and her mother’s name, emptying her parents’ £40,579 savings into it. Over the next 15 years, the pair siphoned off state and private pension payments, industrial injuries benefits and winter fuel payments. They also took out loans and credit cards in the Wycherleys’ names. In total, the couple stole £286,285.36 from them, the state and the banks. And in the 15 years after the murders the Edwardses became experts at keeping the Wycherleys “alive”.
They sent Christmas cards to family members signed from “Bill and Pat”, and variously told relatives and neighbours that Susan’s parents had gone travelling in Ireland, or retired to Morecambe, or Brighton, or Bournemouth. The Edwardses would make regular trips to Mansfield to keep the Wycherleys’ empty house in good order, cutting the grass and paying the bills to avoid suspicion or complaints from neighbours.
There were no outward signs of the Edwardses’ stolen wealth; they never owned a car or bought a house. Neighbours say they wore shabby clothes, typically khaki corduroy trousers and a scruffy sweater for Christopher and oversized, out-of-season dresses for Susan. When the council cleared out their flat after the trial, “there was nothing valuable that came out”, one neighbour said. “It was just old stuff, not old as in antique, just old, and not in the best condition.”
“When the killers were arrested, they had one euro in cash, and a suitcase containing clothing and their precious memorabilia”
By 2005, they believed the coast was sufficiently clear to sell the house, for £66,938, to a landlord, who rented it to Sue Bramley. Then, one day, the Department for Work and Pensions sent a letter to Mr Wycherley congratulating him on his impending 100th birthday and asking for a face-to-face meeting to discuss his benefits, assess his needs and arrange a telegram from the Queen. Susan tried to fob them off by writing back as her father and saying there was no need for a meeting, but the DWP would not take no for an answer.
Sensing the net was closing in, the couple fled to France, but after living in Lille for a year they once again ran out of cash. Christopher phoned his stepmother, Elizabeth, asking to borrow money. He confided in her that the Wycherleys were dead, but claimed Pat had shot Bill, then Susan had shot Pat during an altercation that ensued. Elizabeth immediately phoned the police.
The Edwardses were arrested in October 2013, three weeks after the bodies were found, as they got off a Eurostar train at London St Pancras station. They had emailed the detective in charge of the case arranging to give themselves up. They had one euro in cash, and a suitcase containing a change of clothes and their precious memorabilia. Despite the vast amount of money they had stolen, they were £160,000 in debt.
While greed was undoubtedly a motive for the murders, so, it seems, was revenge. Susan had for decades been nursing a grudge against her parents because she felt they had cheated her out of an inheritance left to her by a step-grandmother, but which ended up in her parents’ hands. By killing them she may have convinced herself she was simply taking back what was rightfully hers.
At her trial, Susan also claimed she had been sexually abused by her father until she was 11, and that her mother had been complicit. Rob Griffin, who led the investigation, dismissed the claims, saying, “They’d had 15 years to prepare a story that would bring them the least amount of time in prison.”
Yet Mrs Justice Thirlwall, the trial judge, believed Susan, having heard evidence from witnesses who said Bill Wycherley was “irrationally jealous” when his daughter married Christopher Edwards. She did not accept, however, that Susan’s mother knew anything about it, nor that the abuse was the motive for the murders. She also said she was convinced the murders had been Susan’s idea, and that Christopher agreed to do her dirty work.
Sue Bramley recalls the details of what happened in 2013 “like it was yesterday”. The police came by and asked if they could dig up the garden. “I said, ‘No problem – you won’t find anything there.’” They brought in a mini digger and spent hours at work. “Eventually they stopped and started using little hand tools,” Bramley recalls. “I thought, ‘I’ve seen this on the telly. I know what happens here.’” After finding the bodies, the police asked Bramley and her daughter to move out while they searched the house. A bloodstain on the floorboards in Bramley’s bedroom revealed where the murder had taken place. “The first thing I asked them when I moved back in was, ‘Where were they killed? I need you to show me.’”
Bramley works as a nurse in a GP surgery, and attended most days of the trial. She says the experience left her “heartbroken”. What made her stay living in the property? “This is really weird,” she says, “but I have been here all this time and I have lived with them in my garden, but they aren’t here any more. Why move out when nothing has changed?” She was not surprised when a production company contacted her two years ago and asked if they could look around her house. “I’d always said they could make a film out of this.” She was disturbed, though, that the TV series is billed as “darkly funny”. “Yes, it was bizarre what they spent the money on, but it’s far from humorous,” she says. “I won’t be sitting chuckling when it’s on, I know that much.”
In Dagenham, many of those who lived closest to the Edwardses are still there, and still scarred by the knowledge that they had killers living next door. Ernie Lebeau, a retired lorry driver who lived in the adjacent first-floor flat to the Edwardses for 20 years, says, “He would say hello and he would talk to you over the garden fence, but his wife would never say anything.” When Lebeau heard the couple had been arrested for murder, he says he couldn’t believe it. “[Christopher] was very timid and if you shook his hand it was like shaking a wet lettuce leaf. He didn’t look like he could kill a fly.”
The couple were misfits in an East End community where neighbours chat to each other in the street and over garden fences. A middle-aged woman whose front door faces the door to the Edwardses’ flat just a few feet away, remembers the postman leaving parcels at her house “because Susan would never answer the door”. Christopher would then collect the parcels when he got back from work. “He would exchange pleasantries – he was very well-spoken – but he never told us his name. The only reason we knew it was because it was on the parcels.”
“That made it all the more shocking, when they were arrested for murder,” the neighbour continues. “It shows that you really don’t know what goes on behind closed doors and you don’t know who is living next door to you.”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Daily Telegraph © Daily Telegraph Group 2021