Fascinating article , sorry if you can’t read as paywall & it’s quite long . (There’s lots in there about the lady who lives there now) I’ve only posted snippets as it’s paywall & don’t want to break rules
Olivia Colman’s new drama follows the case of Bill and Pat Wycherley, whose bodies lay undiscovered for 15 years.
Next month Bramley and the community of Forest Town in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, will have another reminder when Sky airs
Landscapers, a drama about the case starring Olivia Colman and David Thewlis as the Edwardses.
Their hobby was to buy signed photographs and other memorabilia of Hollywood greats, spending their evenings poring over the trinkets they could ill afford. For 14 years Susan kept up a make-believe correspondence with the French actor Gérard Depardieu, telling her husband they were pen pals when in truth she had been writing to herself in broken English, even buying a franking machine to make it seem as though the envelopes had come from France.
Remarkably, no one heard the shots, not even the occupants of the adjacent semi, and when a neighbour saw Christopher, then aged 41, digging a hole up to his waist in the back garden in the middle of the night, they did not think it suspicious enough to call the police. After burying the couple, Edwards completed the job by planting shrubs on top of the earth mound.
They spent at least £14,000 on mementos of Gary Cooper, and another £20,000 on a signed photograph of Frank Sinatra. Other favourites were Montgomery Clift, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Christopher Edwards, a military history buff, would also buy first editions of books by Churchill and de Gaulle.
The couple wasted no time in pocketing the Wycherleys’ money; Susan Edwards, then aged 39, went to a branch of the Halifax on the Tuesday after the bank holiday and used forged documents to open a joint account in herself and her mother’s name, emptying her parents’ £40,579 savings into it.
Over the next 15 years the pair systematically siphoned off state and private pension payments, industrial injuries benefits and winter fuel payments. They also took out loans and credit cards in the Wycherleys’ names.
In total, the couple stole £286,285.36 from the Wycherleys, the state and banks. And in the 15 years after the murders the Edwardses became experts at keeping the Wycherleys ‘alive’.
They sent Christmas cards to family members signed from ‘Bill and Pat’, replied to correspondence with forged letters, and variously told relatives and neighbours that Susan’s parents had gone travelling in Ireland, or retired to Morecambe, or Brighton, or Bournemouth.
By 2005 they believed the coast was sufficiently clear to sell the house, which they did, for £66,938, to a landlord, who rented it to Sue Bramley.
Then, one day, the Department for Work and Pensions sent a letter to Mr Wycherley congratulating him on his impending 100th birthday and asking for a face-to-face meeting to discuss his benefits, assess his needs and arrange a telegram from the Queen. Susan tried to fob them off by writing back as her father and saying there was no need for a meeting, but the DWP would not take no for an answer.
Sensing the net was closing in, the couple fled to France, but after living in Lille for a year they once again ran out of cash. Christopher phoned his stepmother, Elizabeth, asking to borrow money. He confided in her that the Wycherleys were dead, but claimed Pat had shot Bill, then Susan had shot Pat during an altercation that ensued. Elizabeth immediately phoned the police, who took some convincing that the story of an elderly couple murdered and buried in their back garden 15 years previously could possibly be true.
The Edwardses were finally arrested in October 2013, three weeks after the bodies were found, as they got off a Eurostar train
at London St Pancras station. They had emailed the detective in charge of the case arranging to give themselves up. They had one euro in cash, and a suitcase containing a change of clothes and their precious memorabilia. Despite the vast amount of money they had stolen, they were £160,000 in debt.
The Mansfield Murders: the real-life story behind one of Britain’s most bizarre murder cases
