Murder 1
On my walks into the village centre, I would pass a large wooden black and white timber beamed Tudor styled detached house, set back from the road behind a long front garden. I frequently thought what a charmed and happy existence its occupants must live.
Then, towards the end of 1999, I was visiting my parents in the northwest of England, my father, got all his news updates from the analogue teletext service, accessible from our TV screens. He uncovered a story about a brutal murder in Leicestershire.
“Anstey?” he asked, “Isn’t that where you live?”
At the very moment he was asking this, police incident tape would have cordoned off the Tudor house described above. Forensic officers in white suits would have taken over the place, whilst uninformed officers kept all the onlookers at bay. Its occupants had never enjoyed the happy existence I had imagined after all. The man of the house upon his release from jail turned up at the property with a shotgun. In the small hours, he killed his wife, wounded her sister and then turned the weapon on himself. In the large hall way, police subsequently discovered the wounded and the dead. Quaint houses, dark secrets.
Murder 2
I sold up, severing my ties with Anstey, but then, three years later another brutal slaying occurred even closer to my former house. Twenty doors away from me, down my winding street of terraced houses, jilted love paid a heavy price, with an aggrieved man returning to his estranged partner’s house and set the place ablaze. Their five year old son perished in the fire.
Murder 3
And then, twelve-months later, a local fourteen-year-old boy is lured away from his Anstey address by a peer who he had recently fallen out with. Five miles beyond the village boundaries, in a wooded area, the boy is stabbed and bludgeoned to death with a kitchen knife and claw hammer.
