For 15 years, William and Patricia Wycherley lay buried under their own lawn, killed by their daughter and son-in-law. Had this quiet cul-de-sac been the scene of a family argument gone wrong – or something far stranger? We meet the neighbours...
In the secure storage vaults of Nottinghamshire police headquarters is a box filled with Hollywood memorabilia. There’s a signed photograph of film star
Gary Cooper, unsmiling in a tweed jacket and tie. There’s a bank form, faded at the edges, in which Cooper authorises his stockbroker to sell some shares in a Mexican steel company. There’s a blue-and-cream table card from a 1940s dinner dance, with
Frank Sinatra’s autograph.
These yellowed bits of paper look fairly unremarkable, but the people who owned them were prepared to kill for them. Earlier this year, Susan and Christopher Edwards were sentenced to 25 years for murdering Susan’s elderly mother and father, a crime they managed to conceal for 15 years, while they amassed the contents of this box.
‘They were like ghosts’: Christopher and Susan Edwards met through a dating agency; they had no children or friends.
How could an unassuming middle-aged woman and her bookkeeper husband come to shoot her parents at point-blank range for the sake of some obscure memorabilia? And how did they get away with it for so long? William and Patricia Wycherley were killed at their home in Forest Town, Mansfield, some time over the 1998 May Day bank holiday weekend. As soon as the banks reopened on the Tuesday morning, Susan and Christopher opened a joint account into which they would transfer the Wycherleys’ savings, pensions, disability benefits and winter fuel allowances, gradually siphoning off every penny. They wrapped her parents’ bodies in a duvet cover and buried them a metre under their lawn, a few steps from their own back door.
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John and Lesley Ward have shared the privet hedge backing on to the Wycherleys’ garden for 29 years. John is a police community support officer and can’t believe that the biggest crime Mansfield has known happened right under his nose. “You can imagine the stick I got at work. Worked for Notts police for 25 years and didn’t even see a double murder,” he says, leaning back on his green leather sofa.
“It sounds dreadful now, but when it all kicked off, I thought, we knew nothing about them. Bill used to trim his side of the privet hedge with little scissors, snipping away. I used to go, ‘Do you want me to come around with my hedge trimmer?’ ‘No, I’m all right, thanks,’ he’d say. If Bill was in the garden and I went out cutting the lawn, he’d go in. He didn’t seem to want to be spoken to. He wasn’t rude or anything, they were just happy being on their own. They always seemed to be in or around the house. They didn’t seem to go anywhere.”
Lesley’s eyes dart behind her square spectacles as she pictures her former neighbours. “She was very old-fashioned,” she says. “She looked older than her age. She always had this dark green raincoat on. He was very straight and upright…”
“Like a Victorian father, head of the family,” John chips in.
“They never walked together,” Lesley says. “She was always 10 yards behind him.”
“At one stage, we actually thought they were brother and sister,” John says.
One of only two photographs the police found of William Wycherley. No photos found of his wife, Patricia.
