ABUSIVE HUSBAND OWNED CACHE OF WEAPONS AND DEAD FOX HEAD
THE husband of gunshot victim Rachel Williams was a weapons nut who spent his weekends badger baiting with pals. Rachel escaped with her life after Darren Williams burst into Newport’s Carol Ann salon with a doublebarrelled shotgun and blasted her legs in August 2011. He then fled and hanged himself.
Now the mum – whose 16-year-old son Jack hanged himself after his father’s suicide – has written a book about how she fell head over heels for the thug when she was 21.
She would be tormented and battered by him for the next 18 years.
“Some of the possessions Darren brought with him when he moved into my house were books on gangsters, hunting knives and the heads of a dead fox and a badger,” she said in The Devil at Home.
“‘What the bloody hell are they?’ I asked, as he pulled the heads out of a cardboard box.
“‘Trophies,’ he said proudly. ‘I thought we could put them up here, on this wall.’”
Rachel’s beau owned Patterdale and Lakeland terriers, which he kept at his mother’s house.
“Every Sunday he would get up at the crack of dawn and take them out to some farmland to hunt,” Rachel said.
The animals were trained to hunt foxes and catch badgers.
“The men dug tunnels deep into the ground, put tracking collars on the dogs, then sent them down to catch and kill whatever they found,” Rachel said.
“The men would then have to dig ditches some five and six feet deep to get to the badgers that the dogs had trapped inside.
“It was brutal – not to mention illegal.”
On a trip to Prague with pals Brian and Ann, Darren spotted a weapons shop just before they were due to fly home. He could not get in fast enough. “I wanna see what they got here,” he told Rachel.
He came out with a stun gun and CS gas. Rachel asked if he would be able to take it on their flight.
“We’ll have to see, won’t we?” he said.
“When it was time to catch the plane home all I could think about was what was in Darren’s suitcase,” she said.
“I could tell Brian and Ann were on edge, too, and when we landed at Bristol Airport the three of us walked off ahead of Darren, distancing ourselves from the potential drama.
“By some miracle, he never got stopped and was able to bring the items home.”
They joined the hunting knives in a drawer at the side of their bed.
“After that trip, whenever we talked about other places we could visit for holidays or city breaks, Darren would always want to find out if you could buy weapons out there.”
Rachel invited Darren’s father and new wife Carol on a trip to Poland.
“The only reason Darren agreed to go was so he could go to the weapons stores,” Rachel said.
“Every holiday was an excuse to buy something – flick knives, pepper spray – anything he couldn’t get his hands on over here.
“I let him get on with it. If he was obsessing over his hobbies at least he was leaving me alone.”
In 2004 Darren was jailed for four months after police found an arsenal of weapons under his bed.
They were discovered when they searched the couple’s Newport home after he was arrested for stealing cigarettes.
In a scene that could have been from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Darren phoned from the police station to ask Rachel to hide a gun.
“You know that thing in the shed,” he said.
“The thing of Dylan’s? Just make sure it’s moved.” In the shed was an illegal vermin gun.
“My heart was pounding,” Rachel said.
“S***! I thought. I put the phone down and was about to turn on my heels and go straight to the shed when I heard a knock at the door. It was the police.”
The Devil at Home, by Rachel Williams, is published by Ebury Press, priced £6.99