Triple life of killer cop who treated women like meat
As married PC is cleared of murder but faces jail term for manslaughter of lover...
THE month was October 2011 and Tim Brehmer and a colleague were making headlines in their local newspaper after rescuing a family and their three cats from a house fire. ‘We are very glad that we could be of help,’ the police constable said. ‘But we were just doing our job.’ What the 41-year-old officer failed to make clear was just how all encompassing ‘the job’ was to him.
For starters, he was married to it – Martha, his wife of five years, was a detective in the same force, Dorset Police. But she wasn’t the only woman in his life.
In the autumn of 2011 he’d started an affair with another member of staff – Kate Rhodes, a community support officer who would also go on to become a detective.
He’d swept the younger woman off her feet with his charm and charisma – and by not mentioning the fact that he was married.
For many, juggling a job and two women working side-by-side in the same organisation would have been hard enough.
But not for PC Brehmer, a man on a mission to make the most of his position.
Because he already had a third woman on the go – Claire Parry, a nurse who’d been his lover since 2009, just three years after his own wedding, and whom he continued seeing even after she got married in 2010. Her new husband? Another policeman in the same force.
Despite that, their relationship would continue for the next decade. It didn’t stop when she had her two children. It didn’t stop when Brehmer became a father himself. And it didn’t stop when earlier this year Mrs Parry’s husband, Brehmer’s colleague, accused him of cheating with his wife.
Because Brehmer didn’t care. Describing himself as a ‘devious bastard’, he arrogantly believed he had his double – or triple – life under control.
At home he was a doting husband and father, a pillar of the community. Away from home, he was only interested in one thing, referring to DC Rhodes as a ‘dirty bitch’ he pestered her for sex and treated her like ‘meat’. It is suspected there were other lovers as well.
It was all a ‘game’ to Brehmer who set the rules, making the women communicate via an encrypted messaging service and banning them from talking about his wife or their partners.
But, after all those years of getting away with it, in May of this year Brehmer finally lost control as the scales fell from Mrs Parry’s eyes. She realised he was using her – and that he was nothing more than ‘a man-whore’ and ‘groomer’ with ‘a tool kit’ to woo any woman he met.
Instead of facing up to the consequences, Brehmer’s only thought was to save his own skin.
Confronting Mrs Parry, he stabbed himself in the arm, hoping that if she thought he was suicidal she would not carry out her threat to tell his wife.
When she ignored his pleas, exactly what happened next remains unclear – other than that in what he described as a ‘kerfuffle’ his lover would sustain a fatal compression injury to her neck.
While Brehmer would accept responsibility for her death, pleading guilty to manslaughter, he denied that he had deliberately strangled her.
YESTERDAY, a jury at Salisbury Crown Court cleared him of murder. After the verdict was delivered, and ahead of sentencing today, the dead woman’s husband read out a statement in court: ‘This is how I feel about Brehmer, he is the worst kind of thief,’ PC Andrew Parry said. ‘He has stolen a mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunty, niece and friend.
‘Claire meant so much to so many people. He has robbed me of the opportunity to try and save my marriage and keep my family together. He has robbed our children of a million hugs and kisses from their mummy.
‘It is simply impossible to quantify what he has taken from us, so much that can never be replaced ... Brehmer hasn’t left a hole in our lives, a hole has edges, a beginning and an end. Brehmer has left a gaping chasm in our lives that will stretch on for eternity.’
Born in Zimbabwe, Brehmer came to the UK with his parents as a toddler. His mother was Zimbabwean and his father, a fleet supervisor for a courier firm, a South African with a British passport.
One of three siblings, he was raised in Andover, Hampshire. His parents split when he was young and he went to live with his mum, becoming effectively estranged from his dad as a teenager.
After school, he took a degree in disaster and hazard management at a university in New Zealand, one of only a few places to then offer the course, before returning to the UK in 1999.
On his induction evening to Dorset Police in October 2003, aged 23, he met his future wife.
The pair married in 2006 at a picturesque church in the New Forest and two years later set up home in a £230,000 cottage in a village near Lymington, Hampshire.
‘He was a lovely guy, they were just smitten with each other,’ said a family friend. ‘I know he took his marriage very seriously so I was really surprised to hear that he had been having an affair. He didn’t seem the type.’
In fact within just three years of his marriage he was cheating on his wife, firstly with Mrs Parry, a nurse at Royal Bournemouth Hospital who initially had no idea that he was married.
After his arrest, Brehmer described their affair was ‘on and off’. ‘Claire could offer me and I hoped I could offer Claire some excitement, all the good stuff and not the bad stuff of relationships,’ he would say in a police interview after her death.
‘I clearly am just a ******* deviant, but I was with Claire on and off for a number of years. Somehow we would connect back up again.
‘We had a relationship and I cared for her, I can’t say I loved her but I didn’t want to leave my wife because I loved her and she’s absolutely brilliant and amazing.’
In July 2010, Claire married fellow police officer Andrew Parry.
Photographs on Facebook show the newlyweds celebrating their ‘amazing’ honeymoon in Egypt, posing arm-in-arm in front of the pyramids and enjoying a glass of wine in a luxury hotel.
But a year later, PC Parry became suspicious that all was not well in his marriage: In September 2011, he saw an email on her computer that said ‘she would never love anyone like she loved him’.
‘She promised me it was an old email sent a long time ago,’ Mr Parry said in a statement read out to court. ‘Claire was very distressed and deleted the email, I couldn’t check when it had been sent.’
In October of that year Mrs Parry gave birth to a daughter. At around the same time Brehmer embarked on an affair with DC Rhodes.
Giving evidence, she described how Brehmer swept her off her feet. Like Mrs Parry, she too believed Brehmer was single.
‘He was charming and very personable and charismatic,’ she said. ‘I quickly fell in love with Tim. We engaged in sexual contact but not full intercourse.
‘I found out from a conversation in the office that Tim was married to a detective,’ she said. ‘I was really upset, I thought we had a relationship that was about to start and I was looking forward to it. I broke it off but it was difficult.’
And all the more difficult because Brehmer wouldn’t give up on her.
EVEN after DC Rhodes married in 2015 he pursued her, making her ‘feel like a piece of meat’ by texting while she was on holiday with her husband, calling her a ‘dirty bitch’ and suggesting they meet for sex.
By then she was working at Bournemouth CID, where Brehmer’s wife also worked.
And yet all the time, Brehmer was playing the doting husband and father. A YouTube video posted in 2013 shows him playing with his baby son. In one called ‘Chatting with my five-month-old son’ he playfully – and a little creepily – asks the boy: ‘ What secrets would you like to tell me? What secrets do you know?’
Earlier this year, the ‘ spinning plates’ of his life started to wobble dangerously.
By then, after nine years as a traffic officer, he had been seconded to
the National Police Air Service based at Bournemouth airport. Mother of two Mrs Parry was working as nurse practitioner at a medical centre in Bournemouth, Dorset – and their affair continued.
Her husband was increasingly suspicious, having found Travelodge bookings on their joint bank account and a man’s rugby shirt under the couple’s marital bed.
He also found a Valentine’s card hidden in their bedroom addressed to ‘Curly Toes’, which he said must have been his wife because she ‘did have especially curly toes’.
Using his daughter’s phone he tracked her car as she left work and saw she had travelled to Bournemouth Airport, where Brehmer was based.
When confronted, his wife claimed she had gone to the airport to look at the British Airways planes on the runway. Brehmer told a similar story when PC Parry confronted him outright.
‘I asked him what had been going on and he gave me some wellrehearsed response which matched Claire’s,’ he said.
‘I told him “now is the opportunity to tell me everything, if I found out you are lying I will tell your wife”. He said, “That is everything”.’ Even then Brehmer didn’t have the decency to call it off.
On May 6, three days before Mrs Parry’s death, she had sex with Brehmer at her family home.
The following day she attended a counselling session with her husband, who by now believed their marriage was over.
At the same time Mrs Parry was growing increasingly angry at Brehmer and became determined to expose the lie behind his ‘perfect life’. Having learned of his affair with DC Rhodes, she contacted her.
The pair established that Brehmer was likely to have had more lovers in the emergency services, including another police officer.
‘It was cathartic hearing about his trademark ways and realising I was not his only victim,’ DC Rhodes said.
Meanwhile Mrs Parry said she intended to ruin Brehmer’s life by telling his wife as well as referring him to the police watchdog and reporting him to the taxman for failing to declare a second income he made from gardening jobs. In her messages to DC Rhodes, Mrs Parry wrote ‘Hell hath no fury’ and said she was ‘embarking on a long and slow downfall of Mr manwhore Brehmer’.
She added: ‘He always told me there had never been another woman and I was special to him. I hate him for the issues I am now facing in my marriage.’
Days before she died, she drafted a note to Brehmer’s wife on her phone – one she never ended up sending. It read: ‘There is no easy way to say it but put simply your husband is a man whore.
‘Myself and others have fallen victim to his words and charms, his promises of being in a loveless marriage to only staying for the sake of your children.
‘He sucked me in years ago and made me believe he and I had a future until he realised you were pregnant. He didn’t tell me about you at first, that he was married and when I found out he told me he was going to leave.
‘I have since realised I was not the only one he has weaved this story to, there are at least two more. He tells us that we are special that he has fallen in love with us.’ And so it was that on May 9, Mrs Parry summoned Brehmer to a meeting in a pub car park in West Parley, Dorset,
Due to attend a family barbecue, Brehmer kissed his wife goodbye and told her he was just nipping out to buy some steak. The pair have not spoken since.
When they met, Mrs Parry took Brehmer’s phone and used it to send a message to his wife saying: ‘I am cheating on you.’
The prosecution alleged that Brehmer then took hold of her neck tightly in the crux of his arm, squeezing the life out of her as she struggled to get out of his car.
But Brehmer maintained any injuries she sustained were not intentional, claiming he was trying to push Mrs Parry out of the car in a struggle and ‘fell on top of her by accident’. Arrested by his colleagues, in subsequent interviews he would repeatedly insist: ‘I’m not a bad man.’
Given the trail of death and devastation he has left in his wake, it’s a claim unlikely to garner the slightest flicker of sympathy.