‘THEY WERE A NORMAL FAMILY’
It’s 20 years since a horrific tragedy in Wales sent shockwaves around the world – a husband killed his wife and four children and then himself. Here, the detective in charge of the investigation into the murders looks back at those events. Cathy Owen rep
THE 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 Fiddler’s 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 “perfect couple” who had a lovely home, went on nice holidays and were usually seen out as a family unit.
After the deaths, Cath’s best friend, Deborah, told a documentary: “I do not just believe, I know, that if there had been any problems within the marriage she would have told me.”
It was Deborah and another friend, Mandy, who called round to the house concerned when they hadn’t heard 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.
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 24-hour 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.
“There was a lot of interest in how long the bodies had lain there and there were a lot of questions because it was not evident straight away 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 planning” in the murders and suicide.
It emerged that Robert Mochrie had been alive for more than 24 hours after he had killed his wife and children, while the bodies lay upstairs, because he sent text messages cancelling Bethan’s lifts to school and deliveries of milk.
The 45-year-old businessman then took his own life with “the same methodical planning he had used to kill his own family”.
Why he had done it has never been fully explained, but there have been various theories.
The children had been beset with ill-health – Sian had epilepsy, Luke was recovering well from a brain tumour and Bethan had severe physical and learning disabilities.
At the inquest, 10 months after their deaths it also emerged Cath had had an affair with a former colleague, David Osborne, and that Robert had been seeing a Cardiff prostitute named Charmaine Jacobs once a week.
Robert had been diagnosed with depression in 1990 and 1993, and he had lost money from a venture with the Power Station nightclub in Barry. A meticulously-kept filing system found in the Mochries’ master bedroom revealed “very, very worrying” letters from the bank. They had been using credit cards extensively for months.
Five months before the murders they stopped paying any bills and slipped into arrears.
Eight days before the killings the bank foreclosed on a £80,000 loan; three days before, debt collectors arrived at the door to serve papers on an outstanding £5,000 debt.
The Mochries were £200,000 in debt on the day they died.
Kevin concludes: “What we found was that they were a very normal and very loving family. There was not much lying underneath that would explain why Robert did what he did. Sometimes it can be a combination of things, or something little that flicks something in someone to make them do
something as extreme as this.”