The day I discovered aunt Alice was killed by her ‘cheery’ husband
Rachael Revesz says her family’s dark secret shows how domestic abuse so often leads to murder
On the night of Friday August 30 1946, my great-great-aunt Alice went to sleep next to her husband, George. The couple were going on holiday the next morning; their neighbours were driving them down to St Anne’s for 10 days. Their bags were at the bottom of the stairs.
Early the next morning, a neighbour heard two loud bangs. Around 9am, the neighbours, ready for their own trip, entered the house in Bramhope. The door was unlocked; they saw the bags. They then went upstairs and glimpsed Alice and George, lying in bed, a .5 Webley revolver on the floor.
A jury found that George had murdered Alice in her bed and then had taken his own life – a shocking discovery I only made when I interviewed my grandmother a few years before she died in 2017.
“He waited until Aunty Alice was asleep in bed and shot her through the head and then shot himself,” she told me.
“Fun Uncle George” had been great with children, she recalled, and was good with card tricks.
New figures released last week revealed that domestic violence homicides have reached a five-year high; in England and Wales, an average of two women are killed every week by their partner or ex-partner. As a reporter, I have read and written about countless stories of domestic violence, of men who appeared to turn suddenly, who had “seen red”, or who had been “provoked”. The warning signs, that often build up years before, are too often dismissed.
When Alice was killed, she had been married almost 20 years; the newspaper report following the murder described the couple as “cheerful, contented neighbours without a care in the world”. The murder was described as a “mystery”.
But “cheery” Uncle George clearly
had another side. He was reported to have grievances against the Army corps where he had served and a former employer; the neighbour who first heard the gunshots told reporters George “could speak of nothing but grossly unfair treatment”.
Their funeral was packed with family and friends. There were many witnesses to Alice, a woman who received a medal in 1918 for her service as a nurse in the First World War and gone on to teach, being buried in an unmarked grave in the very church where she had been choir mistress and member of the parish council.
After the guests left Bramhope that day, Alice’s life was effectively erased when she was laid to rest in a grave next to the man who had murdered her and then taken his own life, a jury found, “while the balance of his mind was disturbed”. George had clearly been planning the murder. He had left a certificate for his gun on the pillow next to his dead wife, alongside a letter for the police.
And he may have packed for his holiday – but he had no intention of going. Police found his bank account empty, and in fact he had been embezzling money for at least two years from tenants who lived in a property that his wife and her siblings owned in Leeds. At the time of her death, Alice had just £1 in her account.
New research by criminology expert Dr Jane Monckton Smith shows that men who murder women often follow a “homicide timeline” of eight steps including entering a relationship quickly, coercive control – sometimes triggered by financial difficulty – and threatening suicide.
It’s likely Alice was in the dark about a lot, including their finances. Women were allowed to own property, but they weren’t allowed to open a bank account or get a mortgage without their husband’s approval. Money, and lack of it, can make domestic abuse victims feel trapped. Economic abuse is still prevalent today.
The news of the murder in 1946 clearly shocked the quiet town of Bramhope. But having volunteered for a domestic violence charity, I have seen for myself that abuse does not discriminate. It can affect a wellheeled woman in Kensington, or a low-income family in Hackney. I have seen dozens of male perpetrators smile and hold the door open for you, and act another way at home. I know the police are overstretched, unable to cope with funding cuts.
I worry not enough progress has been made since 1946 – how victims are still written out of history.
Of course, I am too young to have met Alice Hepper, but I plan to buy her a gravestone – which I only found out she was without this year – in the cemetery that is a 15-minute walk from where she spent a decade of her life; proof that this woman existed, loved and served her country.
There is no shame in Alice’s life, or her death. She deserves to be remembered, and for her story to finally be put straight.