SELF-CONFESSED MONSTER WITH A TWISTED SOUL
A SUMMER’S day in Bristol and a family poses for a photo ahead of a wedding.
Centre stage are Anjie and Darren Galsworthy, dressed in all their finery. Standing next to them are their nearest and dearest – to their right Anjie’s son Nathan, the best man, and on their left his partner Shauna, a bridesmaid.
Both smile confidently at the camera, a contrast to the pretty teenage girl on the edge of the group.
Her name is Becky Watts and she is Mr Galsworthy’s daughter from a previous relationship.
She looks uneasy, nervously fingering a clump of brown hair that she has deliberately drawn across one side of her face. Sure, she is there in the picture. But at the same time she looks distant. Excluded.
Just two years have passed since the lens captured that wedding group. But the line-up will never – indeed can never – be re-created.
Becky is dead. In February she was handcuffed, gagged and suffocated in her bedroom, her mutilated body then cut into pieces with a power saw.
Nathan Matthews, her stepbrother, perpetrated that barbaric act, aided and abetted by his girlfriend Shauna Hoare. The 21-year- old, who was pregnant at the time with twins, had their young child with her when Becky was killed.
As for the remaining two – Mr and Mrs Galsworthy – it is hard to imagine the agonies they must endure on a daily basis as they try to comprehend what has befallen their family.
For what is clear now is that the seeds of that killing were sown long ago, something Becky would have been aware of when she posed uneasily for that picture.
By then she knew what sort of a person her stepbrother was – if not what he was capable of.
Vain and socially inadequate, Matthews bitterly resented Becky’s position in the family household, claiming that she took her father and stepmother – his real mother – for granted. His hatred for the teenager festered, occasionally spilling into the open when he would graphically describe to her how he wanted to rip out her toenails or kill her with a sledgehammer.
Later he would claim these comments were made jokingly, a quirk of his ‘unusual’ personality. But the real- ity is that they were a window into his twisted soul.
This was a 28-year- old man who thought the world was against him.
Only in the privacy of his own home was he the boss – his partner, Hoare, was seven years his junior and just 14 or 15 when they first met.
Together they hunkered down in their squalid, clutter-filled flat playing board games and video games and surfing the net.
And there was one particular interest that they shared, one of a twisted, sexual nature. Matthews, who every morning would apply make-up to disguise the bags beneath his eyes, was
‘He was a man who thought the world was against him’
sex-obsessed. He encouraged his girlfriend to join him in a threesome with a female friend and slept with a prostitute (only to suffer the humiliation of failing to perform.) Daily, he would download porn.
Via texts and social media he would then talk to Hoare about abducting their own pretty, petite teenager.
Inevitably, post- arrest, the pair would dismiss such talk as idle banter. But what happened to Becky – pretty, 16 years old and just 5ft 1in tall – would prove, tragically, that it was not.
In interviews with police following his arrest, Matthews was asked to describe himself. He admitted he was emotionally unstable, a ‘Neanderthal’ who could overreact and take things the wrong way. But per- haps it is the following piece of selfassessment that is closest to the mark: ‘You don’t corner a rat in a corner, because they attack.’
Clearly, in Matthews’ eyes, it was he who was the victim.
At the time of his birth, his mother Anjie was 21. His father never featured in his life, not even as a name on his birth certificate. Instead, it was largely left to his grandmother, Margaret May, to bring him up, raising him at her home between the ages of seven and 23.
While he continued to have contact with his mother – who walked him to school and Greggs the bakers for the occasional treat – it is clear his childhood was not as ‘normal’ as he would subsequently claim.
Physically short ( the fact he informed the court he was precisely ‘5ft 5½in’ tall speaks volumes) he also struggled at school, leaving at the age of 16.
He then took an electrical course at the City of Bristol College, but failed in the second year.
A succession of low-paid jobs followed, first as a pizza delivery boy at Domino’s, then a position at Sainsbury’s and another as an electrician’s mate. A spell as a binman lasted just three days, while his most recent employment delivering Chinese takeaways ended after he became annoyed that others were being paid more than him.
His dreams of a career in the military would also come to nothing. While he did well in the army cadets, his time in the Territorial Army – he joined the Royal Logistic Corps at the age of 19 – went less well. Danielle Rogers, who served with Matthews in the TA, remembered him as a
‘stroppy’ individual. ‘He had a bit of an anger problem at times,’ she said. ‘He’d sometimes snap in frustration and throw things in temper.’
One of the main focuses of that anger was Becky. She entered his life as a toddler when their parents started seeing one another. Becky and her older brother Daniel were brought up by the couple in a three-bed house in Bristol, while Matthews was with his grandmother. Seeing his mother playing happy families with someone else’s child went down particularly badly with Matthews. And he grew more jealous as Becky and his mother formed a particularly strong emotional bond.
In legal argument ahead of the trial it was also claimed that when Becky was just eight, he made an inappropriate pass at her, touching her thigh over her clothes. Two of her friends complained of similar contact at the same age.
As Becky got older, relations soured further. And those tensions were exacerbated when Matthews’ mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, causing mobility issues. ‘The main problem was Becky would leave things on the stairs, in the kitchen, in places where my mum would walk,’ he told the court. ‘Obviously step on a bit of clothing, you slip straight away. That was the main problem with her leaving trip hazards around. We said “Can you tidy it up and move them?” And she just wouldn’t listen.’
As for Becky, when she fell seriously ill with anorexia aged 13, her step-brother was unsympathetic. Matthews, who himself claims to suffer from a chronic condition that causes muscular pain throughout his body, felt she was attention-seeking.
Alone with Becky, he’d threaten her, according to her best friend Courtney Bicker. In an interview with police, the 17year-old recalled: ‘Becky’s told me a few times that Nathan would graphically describe – this is her exact words – how he would kill her. ‘I don’t think she told me exactly what he said – I can’t remember – but I know he’s mentioned stuff about, said something about, a sledgehammer once. It’s like she wanted it off her chest and she obviously couldn’t tell anybody else.’
From 2013, Matthews’ grandmother noticed his behaviour was changing. He became increasingly paranoid, started filling the rooms at his home with junk and refused to answer the door or phone.
He and Hoare turned inward on themselves – not that their relationship had ever been particularly conventional. When they met, teenager Hoare was living with her mother, Lisa Donovan. But much of her life had been spent in foster care (an experience shared by her seven siblings).
‘He seemed all right as a person but I didn’t like him with Shauna,’ Mrs Donovan would say of Matthews. ‘He was very flirty with everyone, very sexually orientated.’
Not long after they got together, there was a falling out with Mrs Donovan and the couple cut off contact and moved in together. Hoare started training as a childcare assistant but quit the course after falling pregnant. Because of her status as a previously ‘cared-for’ child, Hoare was provided with council accommodation two miles away from Becky’s home.
The couple would visit regularly, especially after Hoare became Mrs Galsworthy’s registered carer – a role for which she would receive a weekly state-funded payment. Doubtless those visits fuelled the couple’s sense of injustice. They felt Becky was spoilt – with a telly in her bedroom and pocket money to spend on make-up, shoes and clothes.
How much it irked Hoare is impossible to say – as, indeed, it is impossible to define her precise role in the murder. Matthews’ claim that it was he who was responsible for Becky’s death and the disposal of her body was intended to protect his partner (and, by extension, their child.)
As a result, the description they gave of the balance of power in their relationship must be taken with a pinch of salt. Hoare claimed that her time with Matthews was marked by outbursts of violence. These, she told officers, began about three years ago and included an incident when he dragged her across a bed by her hair and briefly throttled her.
On another occasion she claimed she threatened to leave him, only for Mat- thews to go ‘completely psycho’ and start stabbing himself with a fork. Asked by officers why she didn’t leave, she said she had ‘nobody else’. Apparently Matthews made sure of that, taking control over her life and their money.
Hoare said: ‘I feel like a child. He was my dad almost. If I fancied a pie he would say, “You can’t have a pie, it’s too fatty and you’re trying to lose weight.” He controlled every aspect of my life. I don’t have any friends any more because of him.’
Others, including Matthews’ grandmother, are less sure that was really the case. Mrs May said she believed Hoare was not one to be bossed about. She said: ‘She very often told him what to do. She seemed quite dominant in the way she spoke to him.’
Then there were the sexual fantasies the couple shared. Again, Hoare claimed she just went along with it, telling the jury that she had been raped by a stranger as a schoolgirl and that she did not enjoy sex as a result.
Hoare told Matthews that she had a brief same-sex relationship as a young teenager and agreed to take part in threesomes with a female friend.
Following their arrests, police found text and Facebook messages between Hoare and Matthews about kidnap. (Hoare initially denied ever sending such messages, only admitting that she had lied when she appeared in court to give evidence.)
Three months before Becky disappeared, a text message from one of the phones shared by the pair said: ‘F*** you bring me bak 2 pretty schoolgirls den :)’.
A reply later the same day said: ‘Lol yeh I’ll just kidnap them from school.’
Of course it was Matthews’ case that all this was immaterial. That he had simply
‘He was flirty with everyone ... very sexually orientated’ ‘She didn’t show a flicker of emotion in the witness box’
gone to visit his stepsister to shock her into behaving in a more respectful way towards his mother. And that the plan had got terribly out of hand.
Hoare, who is no longer pregnant, claimed she had no idea what her boyfriend was going to do or had done – even though she was just yards away from him when he killed Becky, then cut up her body.
But prosecutor William Mousley QC rejected this version of events, telling the jury that Hoare was involved from start to finish and had presented herself as ‘confident and calculating’. ‘Again, not a flicker of emotion in the whole time she was in the witness box,’ he said. ‘A very cool, one might say very cold individual.’