For 15 years, William and Patricia Wycherley lay buried under their own lawn, killed by their daughter and son-in-law. Had this quiet cul-de-sac been the scene of a family argument gone wrong – or something far stranger? We meet the neighbours

In the secure storage vaults of Nottinghamshire police headquarters is a box filled with Hollywood memorabilia. There’s a signed photograph of film star Gary Cooper, unsmiling in a tweed jacket and tie. There’s a bank form, faded at the edges, in which Cooper authorises his stockbroker to sell some shares in a Mexican steel company. There’s a blue-and-cream table card from a 1940s dinner dance, with Frank Sinatra’s autograph.

These yellowed bits of paper look fairly unremarkable, but the people who owned them were prepared to kill for them. Earlier this year, Susan and Christopher Edwards were sentenced to 25 years for murdering Susan’s elderly mother and father, a crime they managed to conceal for 15 years, while they amassed the contents of this box.

How could an unassuming middle-aged woman and her bookkeeper husband come to shoot her parents at point-blank range for the sake of some obscure memorabilia? And how did they get away with it for so long? William and Patricia Wycherley were killed at their home in Forest Town, Mansfield, some time over the 1998 May Day bank holiday weekend. As soon as the banks reopened on the Tuesday morning, Susan and Christopher opened a joint account into which they would transfer the Wycherleys’ savings, pensions, disability benefits and winter fuel allowances, gradually siphoning off every penny. They wrapped her parents’ bodies in a duvet cover and buried them a metre under their lawn, a few steps from their own back door.

And then… nothing. Nobody came looking for the Wycherleys, and no one noticed they were dead. Susan and Christopher visited the house regularly, mowing the lawn, cleaning the windows and clearing the gutters. They wrote letters to the Wycherleys’ GP’s surgery, excusing them from vaccinations when reminders came in the post. Susan sent Christmas cards to relatives filled with news of her parents’ extended holidays. “It is like he is having his second youth now because when he does speak now he speaks of travel – and travelling. I cannot really keep up with where he is planning to settle!” she wrote to one of her cousins in 2011. “It is good to see them with such zest.” She had buried them 13 years earlier.

Susan and Christopher stole a total of £285,286 from her dead parents. They spent much of it on autographed collectibles, bought online from British and American dealers. That bank form with Cooper’s signature cost them £3,000. A two-sentence typed letter from him, thanking a woman for some fan mail, set them back nearly £2,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘They were like ghosts’: Christopher and Susan Edwards met through a dating agency; they had no children or friends. Photograph: Nottinghamshire police/PA

The packages kept arriving at their door until the Department for Work and Pensions sent William a letter in 2012, congratulating him on his forthcoming 100th birthday and asking for a face-to-face meeting to assess his benefits and arrange a telegram from the Queen. Susan and Christopher sensed their time was up, and went on the run to France for a year before surrendering to the police last October. When they were arrested at the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, they had with them €1, a change of clothes and a suitcase stuffed full of memorabilia.

The couple admitted manslaughter, but not double murder. They said 63-year-old Patricia had shot William, 85, during a late-night row. In their version of events, Patricia had then turned on Susan, saying she was having an affair with Christopher, taunting and provoking her into turning the gun on her mother. Susan told the police she’d been sexually abused by her father until she was 11, and that her mother had been complicit. The couple said it was a crime of passion and claimed that Susan had acted alone. She told Christopher only a week after the shooting, they said, when they returned to Mansfield from their home in Dagenham, ate fish and chips, watched the Eurovision song contest, and got up at 2am to bury the decomposing bodies.

“They’d had 15 years to prepare a story that would bring them the least amount of time in prison,” DCI Rob Griffin, who led the case against the couple, tells me. It was his job to prove this was a calculated double murder, motivated by greed and deserving a long stretch in jail. But proving anything in a case this historic is a challenge: there were no phone records, no CCTV, no emails for him to trawl through (“The footprints people tend to leave behind nowadays weren’t there for us”). So Griffin turned to what he calls “old-fashioned detective work”: tracing relatives and neighbours from 1998 to try to piece together what had happened.

We know relatively little about William and Patricia Wycherley. Bill was the son of a Mansfield coalminer and served in the merchant navy, marrying Pat in 1958. He was 46, she was 23 and pregnant with Susan, their only child. The police found two photographs of Bill: in one, he’s a young man with sloped shoulders, in a suit and tie; in the other, he has white hair, his arms folded tight across a cream cardigan and checked shirt. In both he’s inscrutable, looking away from the camera. They never found any photographs of Pat.

Nor did the police find a single friend of either Bill or Pat; they traced not one of Pat’s relatives. They got in touch with some of Bill’s nieces – the ones who had received the Christmas cards – but they barely knew their uncle and had never met their aunt. “Neither of the Wycherleys were members of clubs, neither really engaged with the neighbours,” Griffin says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of only two photographs the police found of William Wycherley. Photograph: Nottinghamshire police/PA

Their former home at 2 Blenheim Close is equally inscrutable. A semi-detached, two-storey brick house, it lies on the edge of a quiet cul-de-sac. Children play in the road next to the garden fence behind which the couple lay buried for so long.

John and Lesley Ward have shared the privet hedge backing on to the Wycherleys’ garden for 29 years. John is a police community support officer and can’t believe that the biggest crime Mansfield has known happened right under his nose. “You can imagine the stick I got at work. Worked for Notts police for 25 years and didn’t even see a double murder,” he says, leaning back on his green leather sofa. “It sounds dreadful now, but when it all kicked off, I thought, we knew nothing about them. Bill used to trim his side of the privet hedge with little scissors, snipping away. I used to go, ‘Do you want me to come around with my hedge trimmer?’ ‘No, I’m all right, thanks,’ he’d say. If Bill was in the garden and I went out cutting the lawn, he’d go in. He didn’t seem to want to be spoken to. He wasn’t rude or anything, they were just happy being on their own. They always seemed to be in or around the house. They didn’t seem to go anywhere.”

Lesley’s eyes dart behind her square spectacles as she pictures her former neighbours. “She was very old-fashioned,” she says. “She looked older than her age. She always had this dark green raincoat on. He was very straight and upright…”

“Like a Victorian father, head of the family,” John chips in.

“They never walked together,” Lesley says. “She was always 10 yards behind him.”

“At one stage, we actually thought they were brother and sister,” John says.

The Wards are big characters in Forest Town. Their garden is designed for entertaining, with a train track circuiting the lawn and a mock pirate ship on the decking for their grandchildren; they often have impromptu barbecues. The Wycherleys would be invited, but never came. They sometimes heard Bill playing music hall classics on the organ, and another neighbour, Brett, once went around to 2 Blenheim Close to complain about the noise. “He said it was very unloved, shall we say,” Lesley says. “Apparently they smoked a lot. It looked like a dark, smoky house from the outside, with the net curtains.“

“We didn’t see Bill and Pat for a while,” John remembers, “then one day I saw the back door open. Being nosy, I went round – I thought they’d got burglars – and the bloke I now know is Christopher Edwards came out with an extension lead and said, ‘My uncle Bill has moved away. They’ve gone to live in Morecambe. I’ve just come to do a bit of gardening.’ I left him to it.”

Christopher would appear in the garden a few times a month, and John would always ask how Bill and Pat were doing in Morecambe. “Oh, they’re fine, they’re loving it up there, it’s just what they always wanted,” Christopher would say. “He’s getting on a bit, he’s in his 90s, but he’s still having a little walk on the seafront.”

Lesley works at the local post office, and once Christopher came in to pay the Wycherleys’ phone bill. “Some calls had been made and I thought, crafty, they’re using their phone while they’re away.” But the Wards never thought much about Susan and Christopher’s visits.

Then, in 2005, a woman uphill from Blenheim Close forgot to put on her handbrake and her car crashed through the Wycherleys’ garden fence. Within two or three days, it had been repaired. “I said to Lesley, that’s been mended quick, because if it had been your car and my fence, you’d go through insurance. Now we know why: they didn’t want anybody sniffing round because the car was too near the grave.” John blinks in disbelief.

How did they feel when the bodies were found? Lesley shrugs: “Upset. Tragic, really, because this had happened and no one knew about it. To think they were so reclusive that no one missed them.”

“We felt bad about it,” John says. “They were nice people. They just wanted to be left alone.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The garden where William and Patricia Wycherley’s bodies were buried, its lawn regularly cut by their killers. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

The Edwards also wanted to be alone. Like Susan’s parents, they were a self-contained unit. They met through a dating agency and had no children or friends. Christopher had colleagues – he worked as a credit control officer for a copywriting firm in the City – but he didn’t socialise with them because Susan didn’t like him to. A librarian in her early 20s, she hadn’t worked in decades. Her parents were the only people who had any entry into their world, and contact between the two couples was irregular and strained. Susan said in police interviews that her father had never approved of Christopher, and she thought he was jealous when they got married in 1983.

Christopher went to work every day and Susan stayed at home, indoors. Their bank statements and credit card bills suggest she was absorbed in a fantasy universe. He had always been interested in military history and she became fixated by second world war leaders. In the late 90s, they started buying stamps and autographs, and owning these bits of memorabilia became her passion.

During the trial, it emerged that Susan had faked a 14-year correspondence with French actor Gérard Depardieu. She had told Christopher they were pen pals, when really she’d been writing to herself in cod English, using a special stamp to make it look as if the envelopes had a French postmark.

In the real world, they lived in a tiny, rented, top-floor council flat on a quiet road in Dagenham. Many of their former neighbours are true East Enders, working-class people who’ve been there for decades. But while a few knew who Susan and Christopher were, no one had any idea what they were like. The people I speak to in Dagenham find it quite funny that they were living next to murderers, in a way that could only be amusing if you didn’t feel involved.

“As nobody really knew them, it’s not really bothered anybody. What do you do with recluses? I’ve had more conversations with the new couple that moved in recently than I had in the 30-odd years they lived there,” says a woman from two doors up, who doesn’t want to give her name. “They were like ghosts. I don’t think I’d recognise her if she walked past me now in the street.”

“She was very subdued, very quiet,” says the neighbour who lives opposite. “She wouldn’t talk to people; even if she was with him, she kept her head down. It was mainly Christopher who used to talk, but that was only passing the time of day. I know they used to collect things, because they had parcels delivered. If the postman came, she would never open the door. One of my old neighbours used to get quite worried about the lady, because we never used to see her much, and we knew she was in there. And if they did walk down the street, they wouldn’t be walking along together, she’d be behind him.”

Griffin, however, had the impression of a very close couple. “They were completely in love with each other. There were times in the courtroom when she was signalling to him. He would answer a question and from the back of the court she would be going…” He flaps his hands up and down, and shakes his head wildly. Whatever Susan’s fantasy world was, it was a world she shared with Christopher.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A letter written by Susan Edwards to relatives with ‘news’ of the parents she’d killed. Photograph: Nottinghamshire police

John and Hilda Black from two doors down used to see the Edwards heading to the bus stop with bags, probably on their way to Mansfield to tend to the house. “Looking at the fella, you would never think it,” John says.

Were they surprised to hear that the Edwards had stolen more than a quarter of a million pounds? “Yes, because they looked as though they needed money,” Hilda says. “They dressed old-fashioned, they didn’t have a car, they didn’t even have a bike.”

The staff at the family-run Nisa Local where Christopher used to shop were equally shocked. The manager’s eyes light up when I show her his mug shot. “He was my regular customer!” she says, proudly. The last time she saw his face was on the front page of the local paper. “He looked like a proper gentleman, working in the City with a big company. He used to come in at half-five with a briefcase. You wouldn’t believe what he did.”

But Christopher didn’t shop like a City businessman. He only ever bought five or six items, and always wrote the prices down on a little list. “He was very careful with his money. When you gave him the change, he’d count it penny by penny. He’d stand by the door and look at the receipt and check.”

Christopher was counting the pennies because he and Susan were broke. In 2005, they sold 2 Blenheim Close to try to pay off their debts (using Bill and Pat’s birth certificates and forging their signatures), but it wasn’t enough. Then they took out debt-management plans, but the deliveries of memorabilia kept coming. They were paying their creditors £700 a month at the same time as spending more than £7,000 on a single shipment of signed Gary Cooper pieces.

They were spending money that didn’t belong to them, but to which Susan felt entitled. Her step-grandmother had left her £10,000 in the 70s, money that had once belonged to Susan’s maternal grandfather and that Susan’s mother believed was rightfully hers. Susan spent half of it on taking her mother to Graceland, and the rest was used to buy her parents’ former home in Edgware, with Susan’s name on the deeds. But in 1986 her parents persuaded Susan to sign away her rights to the house, which they sold at a profit of more than £25,000, using the money to move to Mansfield.

Susan felt she had been cheated out of an inheritance, and this became a slow-burning resentment, a festering grudge. Financial investigator Clare Dennis of Nottinghamshire police is used to dealing with money laundering and organised crime, but tells me that, “In the 11 years I’ve been a financial investigator, I’ve never seen anything of this nature, where money has been the predominant motive for murder. There would be a three- or four-month gap between each memorabilia purchase. It wouldn’t be one big spending spree.” The books the couple bought were expensive, too: “Big, glossy, illustrated hardback books in relation to war, historic military costumes, featuring Charles de Gaulle. They bought the box set of his memoirs. It wasn’t the kind of reading you’d expect from a couple in their 50s living in London.”

And so it continued until 2012, when the DWP asked for its meeting with Bill. The Edwards were spooked. Christopher stole £10,000 from his employer and they ran away to Lille, De Gaulle’s birthplace. But they couldn’t access the Wycherleys’ account from abroad, Christopher couldn’t find work, and their money ran out. Instead of selling the memorabilia they’d brought with them, in desperation Christopher rang his elderly stepmother, Elizabeth Edwards, confessed to burying Susan’s parents and asked for money to save him and Susan from prison. If the memorabilia hadn’t mattered so much, no one would know today that the Wycherleys were under the lawn. It could have been the perfect crime. But Elizabeth Edwards called the police.

DCI Griffin didn’t want to blaze into 2 Blenheim Close and start digging – a mother and her teenage daughter lived there now, and he only had a bizarre story told by a woman in her 80s to go on. He did some preliminary checks: the solicitors and estate agents involved in the sale of the house confirmed that they never saw the Wycherleys in person. All Bill and Pat’s medical appointments stopped in 1998. It began to sound as if the story might be true.

It took a huge team to excavate the garden and examine the Wycherleys’ remains. There was ground-penetrating radar, cadaver dogs, an archaeologist, anthropologist, entomologist, forensic radiographer, pathologist and a ballistics expert. The murder weapon was identified as a second world war service revolver. Even the gun was a collectible.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Susan Edwards spent thousands on Gary Cooper souvenirs. Photograph: Nottinghamshire police

Meanwhile, the police had been trying to get in touch with Christopher ever since his stepmother told them of his confession. They’d left phone messages and sent emails. Shortly after the bodies were found, an email appeared in Griffin’s inbox from Christopher, with “Surrender” in the subject line. “An extremely polite email,” Griffin smiles, “essentially saying, ‘I’d like to come back to England and hand myself in for a double murder.’ Which he duly did.”

The Edwards were taken to Nottingham and the memorabilia seized, but at first Griffin didn’t realise they were exhibits in the crime. “To be honest, you’d look at it and go, ‘What’s that? Some pictures of Frank Sinatra?’ And put it back. It was only when he announced she’d got a spending problem on stuff like that, when we did a final review of what property we’d got, that we realised.”

Forensic analysis was able to put into serious doubt the Edwards’ account of a family row that escalated. The Wycherleys had both been carefully shot, twice, into the core of their bodies. It was hard to imagine Susan and Pat pulling the trigger, especially when Christopher let slip in his police interviews that he used to be a member of a gun club. Ultimately, their own story undid them. It was so detailed – how they ate haddock and chips and watched Dana International win Eurovision, before getting up at 2am and burying the bodies in their underwear – that they incriminated themselves. The forensic team hadn’t been able to pinpoint when the murders took place, but the Eurovision detail allowed the police to narrow it down to early on that May bank holiday weekend, and they knew Susan had emptied her parents’ bank account on the first business day after that. Bill and Pat were killed for their money.

Fourteen people went to the Wycherleys’ funeral on 11 July this year. None of them could say they knew the couple they were mourning. Only three had even met Pat: John and Lesley Ward, and another neighbour. Bill’s nieces came, as did several victim support officers, Sue Bramley and her daughter, who now live at 2 Blenheim Close, and a reporter from the local paper. It was a humanist service, followed by a cremation. Then they laid a wreath of white lilies in Sue’s garden, on the spot where Bill and Pat used to lie.

Sue has no plans to move house. “A lot of people have said, ‘How can you possibly still live there?’ but I love our home,” she said on the day of the verdicts. “We’ve got a great garden and we’ve had a lot of happy times here. I’ve lived here all this time and the Wycherleys have not done me any harm. They’re not going to do me any harm now.”

As the Edwards begin their sentences in separate prisons, their memorabilia are due to be sold, in line with the Proceeds of Crime Act. It’s listed as Susan’s property, with Christopher’s assets valued at £17.06. They spent £15,000 on the haul found in their suitcase at St Pancras. The police have now had it valued: it is worth £3,000, at most.