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What kind of man kills his wife? A portrait of the murderer next door

Helen Almey and ex-husband Rhys Hancock - Pixel8000
Helen Almey and ex-husband Rhys Hancock - Pixel8000

It was in an unremarkable house, on an unremarkable street, in an unremarkable English village that Helen Hancock was killed. The 39 year-old former P.E teacher was stabbed to death by her ex-husband, Rhys Hancock, who was sentenced to 31 years in prison.

Helen’s death was so violent that prosecutor Michael Auty QC told Derby Crown Court there were “elements of sadism” to it. So much force was used against her body that one of the knives used to stab her was found totally buried inside her flesh. In total 66 injuries were inflicted on her and 37 on her new partner Martin Griffiths. When police arrived at the scene they found Rhys Hancock waiting for them. He immediately confessed. "I have clearly done it haven’t I? I have blood all over my clothes and it is clearly theirs. I have just lost it haven’t I?”, he said.

I was staying in the Derbyshire village of Duffield when Helen was killed last New Year’s Eve. When I heard what had happened I walked over to her house, through the pretty village’s quiet, leafy streets, past terraced cottages. Duffield is a friendly middle-class village full of families, a community so tight-knit that people can tell you the names of the children playing on the street.

Helen lived in a road of smart, matching houses: All with the same red-bricks, white windows and pitched roofs – as simple as if drawn by a child. Each has the same tidy front lawn, with the same neat bushes and rows of recycling bins outside. The blue and white police tape that had been hung to close off the street, the neon yellow police cars and blue pathologist’s tent pitched outside Helen’s house looked as alien in that suburban street as if a UFO had landed.

It seemed as impossible to imagine then, as it still does, that in such an ordinary family home something so brutal had taken place. Yet the disturbing reality is that for women it is with the people they have loved most that they are least safe.

An Office of National Statistics analysis of homicides, released in February this year, showed that female victims of homicide aged over 16 years were more likely to be killed by a partner or ex-partner than anyone else (by contrast men were more likely to be killed by a friend or acquaintance).

Over the last 10 years in the UK, a woman has been killed by a partner or ex-partner, every four days. Last year the number of women killed by a current or former partner escalated to their highest levels in 14 years.

Since the pandemic started things have got worse. Domestic abuse and violence increased by 20 percent during the lockdown with the UN describing the worldwide increase as a “shadow pandemic” alongside Covid-19. At least 16 suspected domestic abuse killings in the UK identified by campaigners since the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions were imposed.

When I asked those who knew Helen what she was like they said “normal”. Typically I was told “when I heard who it was I was just so shocked”, “she is probably the last person I’d have imagined” and  “she was just a normal mum”.

People described her as “vivacious”, “outgoing”, “always smiling” and “really down to earth”. Her father said she was a “beautiful, thoughtful and lovely daughter”. But the thought to which people returned was that “Helen was just so normal, that’s what’s so shocking about it”.

I wish I had been as shocked. But having covered murder cases before I had already learned that terrible truth – that heinous crimes don’t happen in the underground, to shady figures in foreboding settings on dark streets. They happen to ordinary people, in family homes, in the places where we all live.

It is that horror of everyday terror, which is key to the latest Netflix documentary everyone is gripped by American Murder: The Family Next Door. (If you have not seen it then stop reading now as I am about to reveal what takes place).

It tells the story of an ordinary American family – Shanann and Chris Watts and their young daughters Bella and Celeste, who live in a smart Colorado suburb.

When Shanann is killed we learn Chris was responsible for her death. Having killed her, he stuffed her body into his car alongside his frightened young daughters, then drove them to a remote spot and killed them. A prosecutor called Chris Watt’s actions the most inhuman, vicious crime he’d seen in 20 years.

What is interesting about this documentary is that it uses “real time” footage of their normal, happy family life. Shanann documented so much of it online, uploading romantic footage of her wedding and sweet videos of her baking cookies with her girls. One video shows her telling Chris she is pregnant with their third child. She was 15 weeks when he killed her.

American Murder draws out the way we use social media to construct a false portrait of our lives. The endless photos and videos of the Watts happy family belie what is often a complex relationship behind-the-scenes – messy, as all marriages are.

More powerfully, the show builds on our horror at realising such an appalling crime can take place in such an ordinary setting, in an ordinary family, carried out by a seemingly “ordinary” husband.

Chris Watts committed murder – not in a moment of passion or anger or triggering a temporary insanity, but with premeditation and chilling indifference. Shortly after he had brutally murdered his wife and young daughters, he called an estate agent to put his house on the market.

Rhys Hancock acted with similar horrifying calm. A former headteacher, on the day he killed Helen, he first went for a cup of tea with his mum. He told his mother then he “felt like killing”, dispassionately reasoning that if he did he would be out of jail by his 60s. Later his mother told police she had “never seen him so calm”.

In American Murder a detective trying to make sense of Chris’s brutal crime tries to ask him to explain his actions. “Either you’re this monster,” the police officer starts, “or...”, he trails off. He does not seem to want to admit the truth. That Chris could be both.

When Helen Albrecht covered the trail of Adolf Eichmann she coined the phrase the “banality of evil” to explain her conclusion that the most shocking thing about a man who had committed such atrocities was how ”terrifyingly normal” he was.

Domestic murderers may commit acts which are monstrous but they are not “monsters”. To call them that takes away from the horrifying truth. It is not monsters who commit domestic murders against women – it is normal men. It is the man living in the house next door. It is someone’s brother, someone’s husband, someone’s son. Someone who other people can’t imagine committing such a heinous crime, because they were just so normal; the normal family next door.