Old-fashioned police work that cracked mystery
The tranquillity of a sleepy hamlet in South Gloucestershire was shattered one morning 40 years ago when a bomb exploded. What unfolded in the following weeks was a plot worthy of any detective novel, as explains.
ON the morning of Monday April 9 1984, 37-year-old Margaret Backhouse got into the driving seat of her husband’s Volvo in the stone-built garage at their home.
She and Graham Backhouse ran Widden Hill Farm, on the edge of the village of Horton in South Gloucestershire and she needed to go to Wotton-under-Edge to pick up some veterinary supplies.
She would have used her own Fiat, but her husband told her that its ignition wasn’t working properly and suggested she use his car instead.
Maggie Backhouse turned the key in the Volvo and began to reverse the car out of the garage. A moment later, a home-made bomb under the driver’s seat exploded.
The blast did not kill her. As she crawled from the car the driver and passenger in a passing school minibus saw what had happened and stopped to try and help. They looked for Mr Backhouse, who called an ambulance, saying his wife had been injured by an explosion.
Maggie Backhouse was rushed to
Frenchay Hospital where she underwent surgery for injuries that were extensive but not, as it turned out, life-threatening. Two-thirds of a pound of lead and metal fragments were removed from her legs and hips.
A police guard was placed at Mrs Backhouse’s bedside. The police also sealed off the farm and called in army bomb disposal experts from Tidworth near Salisbury to search for further explosives. They found none.
The papers the following morning were full of stories about how the car bomb had been the culmination of a campaign of harassment which had been going on for some weeks. There had been hate mail and menacing phone calls and the week before the severed head of a lamb had been left outside the farm.
It was assumed that the bomb had been intended for Mr Backhouse, and a police guard was placed on his home, but after a few days he refused it. The police installed a panic button instead.
Three weeks after the bomb went off, on the evening of Monday April 30 1984, Backhouse called the police from his home.
When they arrived they found him with wounds to his face and chest evidently inflicted with a Stanley knife.
Lying on the floor was the body of one of his fellow villagers, former army officer Colyn Bedale-Taylor, aged 63, dead from a shotgun wound in the hallway and whose right hand held the knife.
It appeared that Mr Bedale-Taylor had been behind the harassment campaign and the car bomb. Backhouse said that he had come to Widden Hill Farm and attacked him with the knife; Backhouse had defended himself with his shotgun.
But that was far from the end of the story.
As a nation, the British are obsessed with murder mysteries. We eagerly consume novels, movies and TV serials in which a brilliant detective pits his/her wits against some killer who has usually resorted to some clever plot to avoid suspicion themselves. Just before the end, our hero/ine unmasks the murderer, often only just in the nick of time.
Of course, as we all know, real life isn’t like that at all. Most murders are easily enough solved and rather than a process of clever deduction, the police procedure is one of amassing enough evidence to make the charge stick. Any detective will tell you that once you reach the rank of Inspector, almost all your time is spent behind a desk, dealing with endless paperwork.
Real life is also fraught with a number of unsolved cases which have defied the skills of detectives and forensic science.
But what happened in Horton in 1984 and the case that came to trial at Bristol Crown Court the following year really was like one of those TV crime dramas – all the way to its quiet village setting and, indeed, to some old-fashioned police work.
But this wasn’t fiction. It was real, and it brought down devastating consequences onto two families. The Backhouses had two schoolage children whose paternal grandmother also lived in the village. Mr Bedale-Taylor and his wife had two daughters and a son, all adults. Another son had died in a road accident the previous year.
Graham Backhouse, aged 43 at the time, had been a failure in life.
Neighbours said he hadn’t really wanted to take over the running of the family farm. Another told the papers that Backhouse had talked about writing murder mystery novels.
He also had debts of over £70,000. For a public school-educated white Englishman of the time, the thought of being such a loser would have been too much to bear. In court, he boasted of his sexual adventures, including an on-off sexual relationship with an attractive college-educated local girl half his age – something she contemptuously denied.
Whatever the pop-psychology, he came up with what he thought was a foolproof plan to solve his problems. He would kill his wife with a bomb, making it look like it was the result of a feud with a neighbour, and he would collect £100,000 on her life insurance.
The campaign of harassment and intimidation was not the work of Colyn Bedale-Taylor or any other neighbour. Backhouse did it all himself – the threatening calls and mail. On a fencepost next to the severed sheep’s head was a note saying “You next”. This was him setting the scene for the murder of his wife – the work of some unidentified local with a grudge.
Things started to unravel the moment the bomb went off and failed to kill his wife. He now needed to divert suspicion from
himself and find a fall-guy who could take the blame. And it was easier to get a dead man to take the blame.
The police weren’t having it. Less than a fortnight after Mr BedaleTaylor’s death they were confident that they had enough to charge him with the murder of Mr Bedale-Taylor and the attempted murder of his wife.
For the police, a lot didn’t stack up. He had told the ambulance controller his wife had been injured by an explosion at a time when he was elsewhere on the farm. How did he know it had been an explosion?
The Stanley knife with which Mr Bedale-Taylor had supposedly attacked him and which was found in the dead man’s hand had the letters “CBT” scratched onto it. Mr Bedale-Taylor was a handyman – he had put up a community noticeboard in the village the day he was killed – and meticulous in the care of his tools. Police didn’t find his initials on any of the rest. Backhouse had evidently overdone things by trying to make it look certain the knife belonged to BedaleTaylor.
When being held on remand before his trial, Backhouse offered another prisoner £2,000 to smuggle out a letter to the Bristol Post implicating Mr Bedale-Taylor in the bombing. And yet, this supposedly smart man who planned on writing murder mysteries made the dumbest of mistakes – the handwriting on the letter was identical to the threatening letters he had received before the bombing.
During the trial at Bristol Crown Court in February 1985 the court was told how Avon & Somerset detectives and Home Office forensic experts re-built the bomb from fragments, proving that Backhouse had had access to every single component – detonator, shotgun cartridges, electric wiring and steel pipe.
Two doctors testified that the knife wounds that Mr Bedale-Taylor had inflicted were probably selfinflicted.
The jury of eight men and four women deliberated for five hours and returned a 10-2 majority verdict: guilty.
“You are a devious and wicked man,” said Mr Justice Stuart-Smith.
“Not content with trying to kill a wife who, according to your own evidence, loved you and had done you no wrong, you then set about cold-bloodedly to plot and kill your neighbour who had never done you any harm and you barely knew.”
Maggie Backhouse and other members of the family had sat through the trial. As he was led away, he did not look at his wife.
Backhouse died in prison ten years later of a heart attack. Mrs Backhouse died in her sleep the following year.
The outcome of the trial was an immense relief to Colyn BedaleTaylor’s family. Local writer and broadcaster Derek Robinson, who lived in Horton at the time, wrote in the Western Daily Press: “One of the saddest aspects of the trial was the way it virtually put Colyn in the dock.
“I know the defence was entitled to do this, but I felt enormous sympathy for the rest of the family, made to suffer accusations about someone they loved, who was dead and unable to answer.
“The headlines will fade and be forgotten. The suffering will not.”