Where to bury the bodies?
That’s the question killers have faced down the ages – and the answer often appears to be the same. In the garden.
Landscapers, Sky’s new four-part drama series in which Olivia Colman and David Thewlis play killers Susan and Christopher Edwards, is a perfect example.
The couple were convicted at Nottingham Crown Court in 2014 for the murder of Susan’s parents – William and Patricia Wycherley.
They then buried their victims in the garden of the family home.
Of course murder involves disposal, and the Edwards were not the first killers to use the garden. Think of the Wests, Dennis Nilsen, Peter Tobin, and Reg Christie in Rillington Place.
The killer has the tools to hand in the shed to dig the hole and can control who has access to the garden. And, of course, for as long as you stay in the house you – and only you – know who lies buried in the flower bed. It’s a form of power over the victim, even after death.
What is bizarre about the Edwards is that they opted to sell the house where the bodies were buried – getting their hands on much needed cash but surely taking a huge risk if the buyer is a keen gardener.
I wasn’t sure if I was expected to view Landscapers as a drama or as a comedy – but there was no need for theatrical over-statement as this “true crime” case was already surreal, and as bizarre a case as I have ever encountered.
The Edwards shot William and Patricia in 1998 and then, after watching Dana International win Eurovison, buried their bodies in the back garden of William and Patricia’s semi-detached – 2 Blenheim Close in Forest Town in Nottinghamshire.
For the next 15 years, they kept up a fiction that William and Patricia were still alive, so as to syphon off state and private pensions, clear out bank accounts, open up credit cards in the dead couple’s names, and raised almost £245,000 in the process.
They even sold 2 Blenheim Close in 2005 for £66,938 – the only time that Christopher ever disagreed with Susan because, as he said in court, it meant they had “lost control of the burial site”.
When they were arrested in 2013 at St Pancras Station – having fled to France fearing the Department for Work and Pensions wanted to meet William, who was about to turn 100 – the money was spent.
And what did they spend the money on? Hollywood memorabilia, especially photographs, letters and keepsakes of Gary Cooper and Frank Sinatra. Susan would also write letters to Christopher pretending to be Gerard Depardieu.
This strange couple lived in their own fantasy world and sustained each other in their disordered and bizarre view of themselves, what they had done, and of the world that surrounded them.
Here is the classic folie a deux – a madness shared by two. They are even now still insisting that they are innocent.
What intrigues me more, although this is played for laughs in Landscapers, is that the Edwards were not in fact unmasked by the sale of William and Patricia’s house and it would be another eight years before they were arrested.
Christopher did not lose “control of the burial site” in the garden – they were caught purely and simply because they continued to claim money for their
dead victims for decades and eventually somebody in authority cottoned on.
So maybe the garden is the best place to bury the bodies after all.
Writing from prison to his garden-loving parents in 1949 as he awaited execution, John George Haigh, the “acid bath murderer”, suggested to them that “leave your car outside in the street without lights and the police will be down on you in a flash, but if you’re murdering someone at the bottom of your garden, they’ll never discover that.”
It would seem he was absolutely correct.
