20 years since murders
T
HE photograph of the shy mum in her graduation gown, surrounded by her proud husband and four children, was the one that was published around the world.
It illustrated just how shocking and sad it was that a father had killed his wife and children before taking his own life at their Barry home in July 2000.
Cath and Robert Mochrie had been married for 23 years and shared a £250,000 home with their four children – James, 18; Sian, 16; Luke, 14; and 10-year-old Bethan.
They were described by all who knew them as a perfectly loving and happy family, with no sense of the terrible tragedy that was in store.
It might be two decades on, but Kevin O’Neill, the lead detective on the case, can remember exactly where he was when he first heard that he needed to get to a house in Barry – immediately.
“I had been driving into work from Merthyr, when I got the call,” he remembers.
“I was at the Fidlas Elbow roundabout when I was told that a family had been found dead at a house in Barry. I asked the officer at the scene to talk me through what he knew.
“I asked him if anybody could have broken into the house, and he said there was no way anyone had got into the house. There was definitely no sign of a break-in. So, we knew quite early on who had done it... what we had to find out was why.”
Friends described them as the “perp fect couple” who had a lovely home, went on nice holidays and were usually sually seen out as a family unit. nit.
After the deaths, Cath’s best friend, Deborah, told a documentary: y: “I do not just believe, I know, now, that if there had been any y problems within the marriage e she would have told me.”
It was Deborah eborah and another friend, Mandy, ndy, who called round to the house concerned when en they hadn’t heard d from their friend for a time.
They put a ladder to Luke’s bedroom window to see a shape on the bed covered with quilts.
Knowing something was badly wrong, they called the police, who arrived to find a house that looked like “total normality” downstairs, but upstairs from bedroom to bedroom, Cath and her children lay arms by their side with their heads slightly tilted, resting on the pillows.
The five of them had each been killed by between three to five blows to the head, in what police later described as nearly an “execution-style killing”.
On each bedstead a rosary was hanging.
It was an unusual case for the time, and when word got out about a father killing his four children and wife, the world’s Press descended on the small town of Barry.
Kevin O’Neill says: “It was a very unusual case at the time, and there was a lot of press interest.
“It was just at the start of rolling 24hour news and there was a lot of coverage of the case in the UK, and across the world.
“There were press vans and lots of reporters outside the house and I remember we held a press conference at the police station in Barry to give an update on our investigations, and when I got up to speak there was flashing lights g going g off everywhere. y
“There was a lot of interest in how long the bodies had lain there and there was a lot of questions because it was not evident straightaway why he had done it.
“Then as quickly as they arrived, the Press disappeared when Concorde crashed in Paris and we were left to get on with the investigation.”
The police investigations found that, as Kevin explains, there had been a “degree of plan
ning”