Family Annihilation

Debate between Stephen Gilbert and Jonathan Evans

Wednesday 6th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Evans (Cardiff North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to introduce this rather grim subject under your chairmanship, Mr Amess, given your committed support for family life.

Ten-year-old Ben Philpotts will always be remembered by his teachers at Trevisker community primary school in Cornwall with his hand eagerly in the air and with a beaming smile. Ben was a positive spirit, very popular and a much-loved member of his school community in St Eval, near Wadebridge. He was a boy who showed enthusiasm for everything that he undertook. He was a keen member of his local football team and was a natural sportsman.

Ben’s uncle, my constituent, Don Philpotts came to my constituency surgery a few months ago to tell me his tragic story. Ben’s short life ended on 18 January 2010 when his father, Harry, bludgeoned him to death with a sledgehammer, causing severe head injuries from which he quickly died. Harry had also murdered Ben’s mother, Patricia, and later set fire to the family home, resulting in widespread burns to himself, from which he died a few days later.

[Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate on a tragic event in Cornwall that horrified the local community. Does he agree that we must do everything that we can to protect vulnerable people from such incidents?

[Jonathan Evans]

I most certainly do. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s work on this case. Part of the family lives in my constituency, but the events took place in his constituency, so this is a classic example of working together.

For some time before the events, Ben’s father had been receiving treatment for mental health problems from Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. During that treatment, Harry made threats against his wife and son, but those threats were not taken seriously by those treating him and were never communicated to his wife on the grounds of patient confidentiality. The case was later considered in a serious case review compiled by the local safeguarding children board in Cornwall. The report highlighted that Ben’s father had experienced mental health problems for two years and once had delusional thoughts about his son. The report concluded that no evidence could be found that mental health staff had considered the implications for Ben of his father’s return to live at the family home or considered that Harry’s co-operation with treatment to manage his delusional and paranoid systems was neither consistent nor maintained. On the contrary, no agency reported any child protection concerns regarding Ben or registered any concerns for his safety at the time of his death.

Although my constituent, Ben’s uncle, remains deeply dissatisfied with the failure to properly assess the risk to Ben and his mother, or to inform her of the delusional and paranoid thoughts that her husband had expressed to mental health staff, he is also anxious that there should be much more awareness of the public policy challenges of such cases. The issues cut across several areas of Government policy, and my aim today is to draw wider attention to some common themes that arise in such cases and to encourage the Government to consider a cross-departmental approach to understanding and responding to those issues.

Ben’s murder was front-page news in the media and daily newspapers. We can all recall cases that appear to have a similar theme. Richard and Clair Smith from Pudsey and their children, Aaron and Ben, were described as “the perfect family.” They similarly made news headlines two years ago when Richard stabbed and strangled his wife, before stabbing and suffocating his sons, aged nine and one. He then set fire to the family home, dying of smoke inhalation. Richard also had mental health problems. He was described as an obsessive and driven man who appeared to have been motivated by depression to seek the destruction of both himself and his entire family.

Just days before the Pudsey murders, another father reportedly turned on his family. Tobias Day, from Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, had recently lost his job as a policeman. He killed his wife, Samantha, and seven-year-old daughter, Genevieve, and he tried to kill his two other children, Kimberly and Adam, before finally taking his own life. Just over a decade ago, Robert Mochrie murdered his wife and four children in Barry, South Wales, before calling the school bus operator to say that his 10-year-old disabled daughter would not be attending school that week; he also cancelled the milk. Later he hanged himself, surrounded by his murdered family. He had also been previously treated for depression.

“Family annihilation” is the generic term applied to such cases in the USA and has been adopted here. In essence, the cases are those in which a parent—almost invariably a man—murders his partner and his own children before going on to commit suicide.

Professor David Wilson and Dr Elizabeth Yardley of the centre for applied criminology at Birmingham City university have undertaken a historical analysis of such cases going back to the 1980s. Professor Wilson is also editor of The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, which recently published some preliminary findings from his research. I am grateful to Professor Wilson for his guidance on this debate.

Professor Wilson and his colleagues examined 71 cases in England and Wales between 1980 and 2012—59 involving fathers and 12 cases in which the mother was the murderer. In almost all the cases involving men, the wife or partner was included in the murders, but in the cases where the mother committed the crimes, the husband or partner was not a victim. An example of the latter is the Donnison case in 2010 in Heathfield, East Sussex, which neighbours the Minister’s constituency. That lends weight to the proposition that family annihilation might predominantly be about a personal crisis of masculinity.

Professor Wilson’s team has suggested that there are certain similarities that subdivide such crimes into four broad categories. Anomic cases are those in which the family is seen as directly linked to the economic and financial success of the father. When that is threatened, the perpetrator responds by seeking to destroy himself, his home and his entire family. Self-righteous cases are those in which the murderer blames the mother for a family breakdown. The pre-eminent role of the father is viewed by the murderer as pivotal to his own image and concept of family, which causes him to obliterate his family. Disappointed cases are those in which the father believes the family have turned against him and, for instance, failed to follow his strictures on family life or religious matters. Finally, paranoid cases are those in which the offender harbours mental health delusions about his family.