Thomas Schreiber spent the morning of 7 April visiting his father’s grave – it was the eighth anniversary of his death – and in the afternoon worked on an abstract painting while downing gin and tonics. Art was Schreiber’s passion, firing his imagination and soothing his mind. Drinking regularly and heavily was another mechanism for trying to keep despair at bay.
As the day wore on, Schreiber left his makeshift studio in the snooker room at Moorhill, the Dorset mansion he was sharing with his mother, Anne Schreiber, and her partner, the wealthy landowner and hotelier Sir Richard Sutton, and appeared in their part of the house.
The mood was horribly tense. For almost 20 years since his parents split and Anne moved in with Sutton, Schreiber had seethed at the relationship. He felt the couple had neglected his late father, David, and believed his sisters, Rose and Louisa, were the favourites.
Schreiber also resented his reliance on Sutton’s money – he had never settled on a “proper” career – and believed his family did not take his art seriously. To make an ugly situation worse, the three had been locked down together during the Covid pandemic. Schreiber felt trapped, later telling a psychiatrist that lockdown was a “full frontal” attack on his mental health.
Quite what ignited the explosion of violence may never be known. Anne Schreiber has fleeting memories, Sutton did not live to tell the tale and the account Schreiber gave cannot be trusted.
But piecing together the evidence of blood stains, trails and broken glass, the best bet is that a drunken Schreiber attacked Sutton in his study, glassing him the face with a whisky tumbler.
He then went into the kitchen, grabbed a knife and stabbed his mother repeatedly. She was so brutalised that she looked as if she had been in a road crash and was left paralysed. Sutton tried to raise the alarm but Schreiber pursued him upstairs, where he finished him off.
The smouldering buildup to the attack appears to have begun in Schreiber’s teenage years when his family lived in a farmhouse in the Dorset village of Stalbridge Weston, nine miles from Moorhill. Anne Schreiber is a physiotherapist originally from Denmark, and her ex-husband David was a translator.
David was charismatic and theatrical but a problem drinker. He was known for discharging guns drunkenly outside the farmhouse and often threatened to kill himself. But Schreiber doted on him and was devastated at the collapse of his parents’ marriage in 2002 when he was 16.
At about the same time, Sutton’s relationship with his wife, Lady Fiamma Sutton, broke down. The Sutton family, whose ancestry can be traced to the time of William the Conquerer, is hugely rich, owning thousands of acres of farmland in the UK and the US as well as London hotels including The Athenaeum.
The Schreibers and Suttons were friends but Thomas was taken aback when his mother revealed that she – and her children – were to move into Sutton’s mansion. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Schreiber said. “I didn’t know if my mother was in love with this man.”
Schreiber did not stick around. In his late teens he went to school and college in Denmark before studying music technology in London. He DJ’d and collected vinyl records, flitting from job to job in the capital.
Back in Dorset, David Schreiber’s drinking worsened. Sutton suggested he could move into Moorhill if he agreed to go into rehab. David refused and in 2013 died, suffering from a chronic memory disorder caused by his alcohol misuse.
Schreiber felt Sutton and the rest of his family had not done enough for his father. His hatred and jealousy deepened, though Sutton was generous, giving him £100,000 and a £1,000-a-month allowance, hoping this would help him become independent.
In 2016, Schreiber moved to Australia with his then girlfriend but they split up and in January 2019 he was back in the UK and moved into Moorhill. He was supposed to spend only a few weeks there but became a permanent, angry fixture.
In March 2019, he went to see a therapist, who found him a deeply hurt man, a “lost child” who felt abandoned by his parents and financially imprisoned by Sutton, his problems exacerbated by alcohol.
Schreiber could be physically aggressive to his family. In the summer of 2019, he punched his mother, possibly after she said he was a drunk, like his father, and a leech. Still, he stayed put and when Covid hit he was marooned, locked down with Sutton and Anne.
Schreiber began to tell friends that he planned to take revenge on Sutton and his “gold-digging” mother. By the start of 2021, he was thinking about murder day and night. “I want them to suffer,” he said.
In the witness box during his trial, Schreiber claimed that on 7 April a voice told him: “Attack, attack, attack.” Afterwards, Schreiber jumped into Sutton’s Range Rover. He rang friends and family to tell them he planned to take his own life. Instead he drove to London, chased by the police at speeds of up to 135mph, until officers carried out a “hard stop”. When armed police smashed their way into Moorhill they found the bloodbath he had left behind.
