Neil Rutherford was known as a quiet man who drank alone and grew tomatoes which he shared freely. He was nicknamed "the commander" because of his former career in the navy.
The ex serviceman, who had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy before retiring after 19 years service as a Lieutenant Commander, was known to be fidgety and to speak little. But few thought him a danger.
They were stunned when he was found dead, clutching a gun, having apparently killed four people at the hotel where he was working as a gardener in Penmaenmawr, Conwy.
The only explanation detectives could fathom was that the 54-year-old divorced serviceman had snapped, shooting the hotel owner, her daughter and son-in-law and their family friend, before turning the gun on himself in one of Wales' most notorious mass murders.
The scene described by the first person to arrive at the Red Gables hotel was horrific. The historic building was on fire. A man lay bleeding in the street. Four more people were already dead in the blazing building.
The eyewitness would give a description to reporters of the scene.
“I ran over and took the man's pulse. It was very weak. He had blood all over his stomach and on his nose. I sent for blankets to keep him warm...He didn't say anything to me and then his pulse stopped. The woman who found him said that he had told her he had been shot. She was in a right state”.
He continued: "The doors were closed so we hammered on them and shouted 'anybody there?'. There was no answer and I didn't want to open the doors because I have seen what draught does to a fire.”
It was the fire service who attended shortly afterwards who found the dead bodies in the house. A doctor who arrived at the scene pronounced the bleeding man outside dead.
Downstairs in the kitchen was the body of a longstanding friend of the hotel owner, a Mr John Gore Green, a 55-year-old who was visiting from Bay City Texas. In an upstairs bedroom, the 24-year-old daughter of the hotel's owner, Lorna, had been shot dead.
In the lounge, the hotel owner Linda Simcox, 59, and her gardener Rutherford were lying dead. In his hand was an automatic pistol. The man who had survived long enough to stagger outside was Mrs Simcox's daughter's husband Alistair McIntyre.
It is thought that the family had been living at the hotel and Mr Gore Green was the only guest.
The landlord of the Bron Eyri hotel, Brian Jones, told the North Wales Weekly News at the time of the shootings in 1976 that "no-one could believe it".
Describing Rutherford, he said: "He would never sit down. He used to pace up and down the room and look out of the window. He would just have half a pint of Guinness and then go. He never stayed longer than half an hour. When we heard about all this on Friday night, no-one could believe it”.
Many have looked for clues as to what drove Rutherford to mass murder by looking at his life story.
His service record is publicly available and details how he progressed rapidly in the Navy after attending naval college for three years before the outbreak of WWII.
As an active serviceman, he progressed from midshipman through to officer ranks serving on a variety of vessels before taking a submarine training course and being given command of the HMS Spiteful submarine patrolling the Pacific sinking Japanese vessels.
After the war, he had a series of further commands both on and off shore and served for a time at the underwater weapons development department.
He left the navy in 1959 yet life was not kind to him. The family firm of shipbuilders which he inherited from his father, Rutherford and Co, went bust in the 1960s. The firm had repaired and built ships for the navy and the RNLI. Rutherford divorced in 1972, four years before the killings.
The hotel became a notorious albatross for the people of Penmaenmawr.
Shortly after the murders, the hotel was refurbished and reopened but the introduction of the A55 bypass in the 1980s resulted in business taking a downturn and it closed its doors in 2004.
The building was left in a state of decay for more than a decade having been vandalised and interior torn to shreds by thieves.
The hotel was finally demolished in 2016 and the road it stood on, previously known as the Red Gables Viaduct, was changed to Ffordd Darbyshire.
