Yes, Westley, on the 12th September 2005 had actually decided to spend the day with his older brother, and had gone across to his home around midday, and during the early part of the afternoon he decided he would go and get some cash from the nearest cash machine, rather than wait until he’d actually got into town. The first cash machine he went to the machine wasn’t working, so he then cycled down to another parade of shops, just on a, on a small estate. There were about six or seven shops on this parade, and he put his bicycle against a wall, waited in the queue, and as the lady left the machine and he went to step up, so somebody tried to push in front of him. He naturally, as I believe most people would do, I certainly would do, he said to the person that they should wait their turn. And the person became very angry, went away swearing, and unbeknown to Westley telephoned his brother. During the actual court case that we went through, roughly about 11months after the incident, there was CCTV footage that showed Westley having used the machine and putting his money away, he was talking to the man that had been behind, and they look across in puzzlement towards the car park area where a car had pulled in at speed, out jumped the driver who joined the earlier man that had tried to push in front of Westley, we later came to realise they were brothers. They walked purposefully at speed towards Westley and the other man, who was still looking puzzled, and one appeared to punch Westley in the neck. He had in fact a knife in his hand, and severed Westley’s carotid artery. This actually happened at 3 oclock in the afternoon.

And how did you hear about it?

Well again it’s such a small world. Somebody actually saw the incident unfolding that knew us as a family, so the news got to me personally before the police had the opportunity to go through the normal process of sending someone and delivering the information in a sensitive way.

So did you get the information by telephone?

The information came by telephone, at that point. The person, I never really established who it was, other than it was someone who knew Westley and knew us as a family, they were saying, We think Westley’s been stabbed

It was 18th September 1992, the boys had gone over to a youth centre, this was about half past ten, they knew they had had to be back by half past ten. My wife and I were just about to go to bed and actually got ready for bed, we were actually in bed, knowing the boys would be home any moment, then we received a phone call from one of my sons, saying that the eldest son was being stabbed and beaten up, on waste ground, at the back of our house. We then quickly got dressed and raced over to the waste ground, we met our other son over there, but by the time we got there it was too late, we found our eldest son lying there in a pool of blood.

How awful.

I raced over to him, I tried to get rid of my other son by making him go to ring for an ambulance, my wife was catching up pretty fast, I made her wait because it wasn’t the best of sights to see.

After what seemed like an eternity, the police finally arrived, and at that time the police said, he felt, he thought he could feel the pulse, I couldn’t, I tried, I couldn’t, I’d tried I couldn’t feel a pulse on my son, and about five minutes later the ambulance crew came. We were then taken back round our own home, supported by a couple of police officers who were basically with us. And I suppose about half an hour later they announced he was dead.

Just to go back to that original part, what happened was one of the boys [who killed my son], I should have mentioned it I suppose stole a motor bike and went into the car park where my sons were playing. I think they were kicking a ball around or something, and almost run them over, and what happened at that point was my eldest son who got killed, he went up and kicked the bike and said, What’re you doing, you know, you nearly just run us over And at that point, the boy said, I’m going to get my mate to stab you That’s how it all came about. That’s how he got the murder charge actually.

Me and my husband were going away to a wedding. My, my friend, very good friend was getting married in Cyprus. So it was all booked and planned and had been done for about 12 months and the plan was that my mum was going to come to my house, look after the children while myself and my husband went away.

Everything was hunky-dory. Off we went. We arrived in Cyprus late on the 16th June and went down for breakfast the following morning. I changed some currency, sat by the pool and the concierge came looking for me. And I presumed it was something to do with my passport. We’d had a bit of a joke because it was about 9 years old my passport and I looked very different. And I was ushered into a room and there was some very official looking people there, so I knew straight away something, it was something quite serious. And they asked me to confirm my name and date of birth and the lady said to me, I’ve got some terrible news. And it was a gut feeling, I knew straight away it was Ben. I just said, It’s Ben, isn’t it? And she said, Yes. I’m sorry to tell you but he’s been killed. So firstly I thought it was a car crash and the next thing I was just on my knees on, on the floor in this room screaming. I just don’t know where it came from. I just started howling. And my husband heard me. He, he was by the pool and I said, What’s happened, what’s happened? And she said, He’s been stabbed. I’ve got no other details. We need to get you home. And I said, I need to ring my mother.

So they gave me the phone. Unbeknown to me my mother, my mother had also been attacked which I didn’t know at the time. I rang my mum’s and my brother answered the phone and he said, Look, Terri, just get home. I said, What’s happened with mum, what’s happened? He said, We’ll tell you when you get back.

There were very good people at the hotel. They got me, me and my husband into a taxi almost immediately and we were on a plane within about an hour and a half. I drank a litre of brandy believe it or not and I don’t’ know how I walked off that plane. But I did, I just felt so violently sick. So arrived home literally a few hours later, to be told that three people had come into the house late evening, into my family home. They’d chased Ben down the road.

He’d come home from his job at about eight oclock at night and unbeknown to Ben these three men were waiting for him at the end of our cul-de-sac. They didn’t know who he was. One of them did but the other two sort of had a description of him. They chased him down the road. He ran into the front room, just literally opened the front door and ran in and said, Grandma, there’s somebody after me. My mum had just got out of the shower, she was still in her dressing gown, and, and my daughters were downstairs. And the next minute there was, there was three men, aged 27, 35 and 17 raining blows on my son.

Just started to batter him. And my mum had no idea what was going on. The next thing my mum was punched and kicked and knocked to the ground and she was, she lost consciousness for a few minutes. When she came round Ben came staggering into the lounge with three stab wounds, one which had pierced his heart. And he, my mum just said, Who, who is it Ben, whos done this? He named that, the man that had done it and the next door neighbour came and tried, tried to resuscitate him. And the ambulance came He were, he was taken to the local hospital but was dead on arrival.

We’ we’ve since found out, obviously during, well basically during the next 24 hours that the younger of the the three, who was seventeen, had had a grudge against Ben for seven months over a girl. The seventeen year old had been out with a girl whod finished with him in favour of Ben. Ben had started going out with this girl for a couple of months, the relationship had even finished, but he’d been emailing people telling them how much he hated Ben and that he was jealous of him. Ben was the captain of the football teamhe was,obviously i’m very biased, he was a beautiful looking boy.

On the 12th October 2005, my Mum had gone to work. My Dad had dropped my Mum off at work and he’d called round here at lunchtime, and somebody had telephoned him to say that my Mum hadn’t turned up at her job. And instantly that unnerved me, and I felt quite worried. I felt like intuitively I knew something was wrong.

And my Dad said, Well you know your Mum, she’s always helping people. She’s probably stopped along the way and she’s helping someone. And it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel right at all. So I said, Well can we ring the hospital? The local hospital, and make sure that nothing’s happened. That my Mum’s been taken in. So my Dad said, Okay, then we’ll do that. And we rang the hospital and no, no, no Mum, no lady of that description or age had been taken in.

So I got my Dad to keep ringing the place where my Mum was supposed to have gone to work. There was just no answer. Anyway my Dad sat for a while,

Then he went home. And I came up to bed for a lay down and I started crying because I just knew something terrible had happened. And I kept saying, Oh please Mum where are you? Please be alright. And I couldn’t rest. And about, my Dad was due to pick my Mum up at half past three so I was so stressed out and impatient that at half past three I rang my Dad’s house, and my Dad answered the phone, and I said, You, you haven’t picked Mum up have you? And he said, No, I’ve had to ring the police and report your Mum missing. And I thought, No, that doesn’t ring true. That doesn’t sound right. Because my Dad can’t have been there, come home, rung the police, all by half past three, so, something, no somebody’s not telling me the truth here.

So I then had to get up and I felt so anxious and stressed out. And it was a terrible time because I knew something was wrong. And I sat downstairs. I like to watch Home and Away, that’s my little treat for the day, and I sat to watch Home and Away, and I was still worried and thinking of my Mum, and then I heard footsteps, footsteps coming up the path, and I stood up and looked out, and I saw my Dad, and I saw a lady and a man with him. And I went to the glass of the door, and I just looked and I just started, I became hysterical, and I started saying, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, can’t be. And I opened the door. , they came in, and

They told you the bad news?

They just said; I was going around the house and wouldn’t let anyone near me and I was just saying, Get off me, no, no, no, no, no I can’t hear this. No, I can’t do this. And my Dad got hold of me and tried to calm me down, and they said, We have found a lady’s body, we can’t tell you anymore than that. And I was saying, Well what do you mean? Found a lady’s body, what can have happened? It is an accident? Has she taken an overdose? And I was running through my mind what could have happened. What has Mum had a fall and cracked her head or? And nobody could tell us anything. And then I just become detached. It was like I came outside of my body and I was looking at myself in this horrendous situation, but my body was trying to protect me. It felt like your body being protective, because it was just too much to take in. It was just way too much to take in. Absolute shock, horror, disbelief, I can’t hear this, because it can’t be true. And it was horrendous.

So what happened the next day?
The next day the police came back around, and I remember one of, the man came into the lounge and he said, I’m awfully sorry to tell you this, but your wife was actually murdered. And, I remember my Dad’s words, he went, Oh God. Oh. And we just couldn’t believe it, and like the first thing my Dad said was, Can you tell us, was she sexually assaulted as well? And, and, and he said, No, I can confirm that your wife wasn’t assaulted, you know sexually assaulted. And, I don’t know, I’d, you just go, you just can’t take it in, it’s just too horrendous, your mind cannot cope with such a huge shock.

In November 1996, a friend of mine that I used to go out clubbing with, she was murdered in her own home. And we didn’t know who had done that for a long time. There was Crimewatch programme on it. And we all had our DNA taken.

How awful.

It was shocking.

A shock.

And then, while we still didn’t, still didn’t know who had done that, seven months later, my ex-boyfriend was also murdered. And he was murdered in the street.

How awful.

He was stabbed. And I went and identified his body.

That must’ve been terrible. Did he not have any close relatives living nearby?

He, he’s from the north of England and you know living down here and.

I’d read in the paper that day that two people had been stabbed. And I thought that sounds like my ex-boyfriend, I wonder if it is. And I rang the police and they said, Well it possibly is. Can you come and identify him [laughs]. So I did.

I went and identified him and it was him.

Is that first time you’ve seen a dead body?

No. No. But

But to see your boyfriend, it must’ve been awful?

It was, yeah. It was shocking.

Well straight after that there’s a gallery round the corner from the coroner and there were some big paintings that I really liked. And it was early in the morning and I went to the gallery. And I went in and sat in this room by myself, surrounded by these beautiful big paintings, Rothko. Do you know Rothko?

Beautiful big redI just had a peaceful, quiet moment to myself just reflecting. And then, and the after that my life had just changed beyond description. I used to be really outgoing, happy, capable, confident person. And when my first friend died, it was like the world had changed so. And everybody was normal and going on about their business and I was working and I was just thinking, How can you all be normal? People don’tthis doesn’t happen in life. I don’t get it And then when my ex was murdered, I was just like, I can’t do this anymore, I don’tI can’t. Life doesn’t make sense. This is not normal. it’s not ok. it’s not reality, as people know it. And that I felt like at that point, part of my soul just left. I just thought, I’m not staying here, this horrible. I don’t like being here And that I wasn’t very well after that.

I was seriously not very well. And for six and half years, I was very ill. I was classed as disabled.

All brought on by these murders?

Hm. I was suicidal. I was cutting, which I’d never considered before.

On the 25th September 2005 I had a phone call about roughly one oclock in the morning. It was my Dad on the phone and I had to work the next day as well, so I was a bit angry at first because I didn’t know why he was phoning me, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying, I thought it was interference with the phone signal.

And then as I figured it out, I could hear that he was crying, and he said, Adam, Lloyd’s, Lloyd’s been attacked, he’s dea, and I remember that, well I just went into a daze really, I can’t even, I can’t even say I felt anything, I didn’t even feel sad, I didn’t I didn’t know what to think, I was just like a zombie after that. And they said that the police were going to come and pick me up and take me to the, to the hospital, so that I could meet them there and see him and things like that. I got dressed, I was wandering around the house just aimlessly, I mean my housemate was still up and he said you know, What’s the matter And I said, My brother’s been, my brother’s dead And I just didn’t, I didn’t have any sort of reaction on my face at all. Although to be honest and I don’t like saying it, because I think it’s a really weird thing, to react like but, I might as well be honest because other people might have reacted the same to news like that, I actually laughed, and I can never understand why, but then it happened again, I was with some friends and we were having a joke and a laugh just trying to lighten the mood, and I can remember we were laughing so hard our sides were splitting and I can remember because I was laughing so much it just suddenly turned into this horrendous amount of crying, but I managed to stop myself before it got like that, because there was this thing at the back of my mind the whole time saying, don’t cry, don’t be stupid you know, Pull yourself together So, even now if I start crying, two sniffles later and then I stop because I feel stupid even when I’m on my own.

Why do you think you feel stupid?

I don’t know, it’s one of the things that was said to me by a member of the family, I don’t know whether, I don’t know whether it was that but I was told, Be strong for your parent, so every time I started to get upset I would choke it back, and walk away, anything to not let myself be seen crying and things like that. And I think as a result of that that maybe one of the reasons that I’m unable to cry as much now because I’ve got this built in thing saying, don’t, don’t cry, don’t be silly, be strong and going to back to before going to the hospital, my parents turned up in the end, and they said the police were unable to pick me up and take me to the hospital because they didn’t have enough police cars. They didn’t have enough resources. So my parents turned up.

Well, it was it was a Christmas in 1992, and I’d recently got married to Jonathan, my husband, we got married in the September, after a very short courtship and Jonathan had moved to London and he’d only been in London for about six weeks, and he was just settling down and we were settling into a new routine of life, and his family had come over from Italy for Christmas, and he had gone to the airport to meet them. There was his mother and his father and his two brothers and his sister, and he’d gone to the airport to meet everybody from the flight from Italy, to bring them back across London on the flat, and there wasn’t enough room in one of my friends cars for a lift, so Jonathan had to travel on the underground to come, to come home really, and he came home with his brother on the underground. So they had to travel across London on the Victoria line up to Finsbury Park, and at Finsbury Park, when they got to Finsbury Park there was a man on the platform who went up behind Jon and attacked Jon and stabbed him three times in the face and one of the blows pierced Jon’s artery above his right eye, and he didn’t regain consciousness, so he didn’t have a chance after the attack really. And the man who killed Jon, who attacked Jon that day put the knife back in his pocket, the tube driver was arriving into the platform when they saw the attack happening and stopped the tube, and the man put the knife back in his pocket, sat on the train and waited to be arrested.

And a policeman came to my flat where I was waiting for the whole family to come back, to tell me that; I answered the door to the police and they told me that Jon had been involved in an incident, and that I needed to go to the hospital. And I realised perhaps that I needed to ask somebody to be there with me, so I rang a friend because my family lived in Cornwall, and went to the hospital, and on the way to the hospital I was informed that Jon had been stabbed in the face and I asked the police officer whether they knew that, whether he was going to die or not, and he said that he didn’t, that he didn’t know. And I remember getting to the hospital and there being lots of police there, yes, men in suits I call them, and Jon’s brother, and they made us wait, the clinical team made us wait because they said they were giving Jon a brain scan. That there was a good sign because Jon was still breathing, so there was that, you know, that was a good sign, and they, we waited.

I was with Jon’s brother and Jon’s brother, I remember him walking up to me and saying, He just came from nowhere because the attack was completely indiscriminate. I mean the gentleman who killed Jon literally had been very menacing on the platform and other people had seen him and moved away, but Jon had not seen the gentleman, and Jon’s brother had seen him on the platform that he was behind them and motioned for Jon to move, and as Jon was moving he stabbed him from behind, so Jon and, all the evidence suggests that they didn’t even make eye contact, so the attack was extremely indiscriminate.

It was 15th of September 2006 and we were home asleep, myself and my partner. And we’d just come back from holiday in Switzerland. And we’re fast asleep. It was as far as I’ve been told, about eleven oclock at night or just after. And the phone rang and I thought, and I always knew that whenever the phone rings at that time, there’s something wrong. But I always get annoyed that someone can ring us at this time and usually it’s my brother or my sister. They both live abroad. Or someone I know that lives abroad and I reached for the phone and then answered. And someone’s voiceand I can’t remember all words. But all I remember is that they said,Fatally wounde [crying].

And I think vaguely remember him asking if I am Tom Easton’s mother. And when he said fatally wounded I, I didn’t comprehend. I just asked, Where is he, which hospital

What’s happened And he said, I’m sorry, he was fatally wounded And then I just I couldn’t speak anymore and I passed the phone to my partner.

And I just I just went and sat on the floor by the bed. And screaming, that’s all I remember then [crying].

Then I ran downstairs because I didn’t want to listen to what he talking to the policeman about. I just ran downstairs and, and, and grabbed the phone and I didn’t know which number what I was trying to do whether I was trying to ring someone or tell someone.

And I’ve been told after that I rang a friend. And she wasn’t there and or she was and probably asleep. And I was just screaming, Tom was kille [crying].

Yes. Just twenty-two years ago my fiancée was brutally stabbed to death in south London. And the way that came about I actually met a man who offered me a gainful employment, at the time I was unemployment. And we decided to proceed with me taking the job he gave me. And over the next two to three days we became, I guess friends. Little did I know that the time that the person I’d met had only recently been released from a jail in Scotland, for cutting somebody’s throat. Having served his time, having been released, he’d only been out of jail six weeks. And he came to London with a view; so I’m told by the police etcetera, that he came to London with a view to kill somebody to go back to jail. I met him in a bar. We became friends. And in the next three days, we decided to invite him to our home for dinner. And on that particular evening, he asked me to make a phone call. In those days, it was 1987mobile phones were built like a brick. And nobody had any because you couldn’t afford them.

And also at the time we’d just moved to our new house and we didn’t, we weren’t on the phone. So I had to go to use a red phone box, which I did. I didn’t realise at the time, he gave me a false name and false number to ring. And it was that point in, in, in the evening when I tried ringing the person he gave me the phone number for, I realised something was drastically wrong. And by the time I reached the end of my street, I, all I could see was police lights and cars trained on what I thought was my neighbour’s house. In actual fact it was mine. And as I ran jumping fences and fences because I didn’t know what was going on, I was panicking. And the nearer and nearer I got, I realised that it was my, my house. And I rapidly approached the door and was knocked back the police and pinned to the ground.

How awful.

And at that point I was screaming, I didn’t know what had gone on. And all the neighbours were out in the streets. And I was taken into the back of a police car and arrested at that point. It, it was a matter of minutes.

And it was during on the, the enormous journey back from the property in south London to the nearest police station, we were doing over a hundred miles an hour. And on the radio, the police radio, they said, Slow down it’s ok, we’ve, we’ve got the man. There was a lot more stronger words were said than that.

But they said, Slow down we’ve already got him but we’ve got to keep Marcus in custody.

So you were a suspect to start with?

Yes I was charged.

But it wasn’t until we got back to the police station, about an hour and half later, that I was stripped and given a paper suit. I still nobody’snobody told me why. And I was asking what had happened all the time. And they said, We can’t tell you. And eventually they got me into a room, out of the cell and they said, We got some bad news for you, your wife’s dead. And I said, Well that’s ok because I’m not married. But we both wore wedding rings because we couldn’t afford to get married. So we both wore wedding rings and pretended. And he said, he gave my fiancé’s name and he just said, She died an hour ago.

And I said, She can’t be dead because I only left her an hour ago.

So I was in total shock. And then I was sedated by the police surgeon. And I woke up the next morning thinking it was a bad dream.