Money fears of father who killed his 'perfect' family

Daily Express - 13th February, 2010 (Nick Constable)

In the chilling jargon of forensic psychology it’s known as ‘family annihilation’. A father – it’s usually the father – kills his wife and children before committing suicide, perhaps in the warped belief that he’s somehow ‘protecting’ them from his failings. The evidence suggests it’s a rare crime. In Oswestry they don’t see it that way.

Nine days ago flower wholesaler Hugh McFall clubbed his wife and teenage daughter to death at their home in one of this Welsh-border town’s typically middle-England suburban roads. He struck in the early hours, probably as they lay sleeping. Then he rang the police, made a sobbing confession and drove to work to hang himself.

Evidence uncovered by the Daily Express this week indicates just how desperate McFall had become. Sources say he’d lost a key contract because he’d ‘cooked the books’; the plants he supplied allegedly didn’t match the charges he made. This aside, his act of homicidal madness has uncanny parallels with the Foster family killings fifteen months ago,

In that case a similarly horrific scene emerged at Osbaston House, a luxury mansion five miles across town. There businessman Christopher Foster shot his wife, Jill, his 15-year-old daughter Kirstie and their horses. Then he torched the house and turned his gun on himself.

In neither case is there any suggestion of an illicit affair (although revenge does figure in some family annihilations). For both Foster and McFall the motive seems rather to have been a straightforward fear of failure; of losing control of the life they’d worked so hard to attain. Rather than live with perceived family shame, better that everyone die.

According to research quoted in the US National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Bulletin, McFall appears to fit the ‘despondent’ rather than ‘angry’ category of male family annihilator. ‘This man is more likely to suffer depression, much less likely to have battered his partner prior to the familicide, and much more likely to commit suicide after killing his family members,’ the NDV bulletin observes.

‘....The killer's professed rationale for his actions invokes a proprietary conception of wife and children.....the killer feels entitled to decide his victims' fates.’

Inevitably locals are seeing links between the Foster and McFall murders. Graham Evans, who used to go clay pigeon shooting with Christopher Foster said: 'You do wonder what was going through McFall's mind before he did this. Was he somehow influenced by Foster? We'll probably never know.

'But people are going to put two and two together because it does seem strange that such dreadful and similar cases can happen within a year or so in the same town.'

Whatever demons were driving Hugh McFall in the early hours of February 5th, his wife and daughter were apparently blissfully unaware of their fate as they settled in for the evening at the family’s £300,000 detached house in Hampton Road, Oswestry. The three of them had only recently returned from a break in New York where, according to neighbours, they’d had ‘the time of their lives’.

Shortly before 9pm on Thursday February 4th 18-year-old Francesca – Frankie to her friends - logged on to her Facebook page to catch up on the usual teenage gossip. Most likely, she was taking a break from A-level exam preparation. Three weeks earlier she’d posted the message ‘Revision, revision revision....officially depressed.’

At 8.51pm she typed what would be her last post – an excited reference to a night out with a boyfriend at her school’s Valentines’ Ball the following evening. It read simply: ‘Buzzing for the V-ball with my date Max Payne.’ A little later, at 10.16pm, she uploaded photographs taken at a friend’s ‘beautiful birthday.’

These were not the actions of a young woman fearing an imminent outburst of domestic violence. Indeed, just a few hours after her death, 17-year-old Max appeared generally baffled at news sweeping the picturesque market town that she was murdered by her father.

‘Frankie and I never had any discussions about her home life that would indicate she had anything other than a great relationship with her mother and father,’ he said. ‘We were great friends and I will miss her so much.’

It’s a sentiment shared by almost everyone who knew Frankie. Beautiful, popular and talented she’d been head girl at the 1,000-pupil Marches School in Oswestry where staff spoke of her as an accomplished musician and ‘the heart and soul’ of school functions. She was set on a career in medicine and planned to do voluntary work in Nepal hospitals.

It is less certain how 56-year-old Sue McFall spent her final hours. But in the weeks before the tragedy she had seemed her usual vibrant, happy self according to customers at the Llanrhaeadr (correct) branch of HSBC, 12 miles across the Welsh border on the edge of the Berwyn mountains, where she worked part-time.

‘She was always smiling and chatting away,’ said one. ‘If there were problems at home you would never have guessed. Sue was a real people person; she saw customers as friends. She was both full of life and happy with life’.

Eight years older than her husband, Sue had two children from a previous marriage – Nicola and Daniel Gillham. Nicola, 29, is a teacher at the Marches School and was particularly close to her step sister. All had been brought up together following the McFall’s marriage 20 years ago.

Friends speak of the family’s togetherness and trappings of success. ‘Hugh was a family man, very hard-working, said Alwyn Thomas, 49, who grew up with the killer. ‘He and Sue were a nice couple, very well suited. Hugh was a happy person, he never looked like someone who had any worries.’ Another friend, Ben Lloyd, said: ‘He drove a Freelander and his wife and daughter had new cars. I thought he was doing very well in fact.’

And yet behind closed doors money clearly was an issue for the McFalls - particularly 48-year-old Hugh, a self-driven, self-made businessman whose family had shed their working class roots in Liverpool in the 1960s for the peace of the Welsh border village of Weston Rhyn, five miles outside Oswestry.

He established his small wholesale flower company, Growing Places, from nothing; rising early most days to collect supplies from flower markets 60 miles north on Merseyside. The business was run from a rented lock-up on the anonymous Bank Top industrial estate in St Martins, near Oswestry, but was re-locating to a larger unit down the road.

Growing Places seemed to be flourishing in the recession. In truth it was struggling for survival, drowned by debt.

The evidence for this is clearer by the day. Among McFall’s best customers and closest friends were the Faulks family who run the local independent supermarket, Stan’s Superstore. Hugh had supplied them with bedding plants for years and he and Sue even holidayed with the partners in the Mediterranean last summer. However, according to local business sources, the accounting issue sparked an irrevocable rift.

One said: ‘Hugh must have been short of cash. He had the millionaire lifestyle, but was maybe some way off the millionaire income. So, bizarrely, he decided to rip off his best customer, Stan's Superstore, where he already had a good deal supplying them on a wholesale basis with fresh flowers and plants every day. He'd be billing them for stuff they never actually received and eventually, of course, they found out he'd been cooking the books.’

In a statement released shortly after the killings Peter, Robert and Andrew Faulks said: ‘We have known his family well and socialised with them. Only last year we holidayed with Hugh and Sue in Cyprus. Hugh has been our supplier for bedding plants and flowers for many years. We are all shocked at what has happened and our thoughts are with his family and what they must be going through.’

Days later, as rumours swirled locally that McFall had been heavily in debt, the Faulks family put out a second statement which revealed they had terminated their contract with him. McFall was invited to attend a meeting with the partners on February 4th but never made it. Instead he returned home, knowing he was ruined.

He had already borrowed heavily from his 82-year-old mother Joan McFall after she sold her house last year to move into sheltered accommodation. The money was aimed at financing his business expansion but was never enough.

Just as the spectre of company meltdown loomed so bills mounted at home. Five months earlier Frankie had switched from Shrewsbury Sixth Form College 18 miles away to £12,000-per-term Oswestry School, one of the oldest independent schools in the country.

She’d completed her first year of A-levels at Shrewsbury but couldn’t settle and was exhausted by the daily bus trip. ‘Private education was never planned,’ said one family friend. ‘Twelve grand was a big bill for Hugh but he was determined to do his best by Frankie. He absolutely doted on her and, besides, he thought he could hold the line for a year.

‘You do wonder about the expensive foreign holidays, the Swiss skiing trips, Cyprus, the winter break in New York – what was that all about given the state of their finances.? But it all comes back to Hugh being in denial and keeping up appearances.’

The financial problems were not lost on Sue McFall. Last year she set up a party balloons business which she ran from home alongside her bank work and her Growing Places admin duties. With banking redundancies sweeping the country it would be another outlet if she lost her job. But she seems to have had no real inkling of the pressures building on her husband.

No one can be sure precisely how or when she and Frankie were brutally bludgeoned to death in the early hours of February 5th. An inquest which opened two days ago but heard evidence only of ‘head injuries’. Friends and relatives believe – hope - they died instantly in their sleep free of pain.

What is clear is that shortly before 5am a distraught Hugh McFall called West Mercia Police, told an operator he had murdered them both and announced that he was taking his own life.

He apparently couldn’t bear to die at the horrific crime scene he’d created in the family home. Instead he drove to the Growing Places unit at St Martins, parked his pale grey Land Rover Freelander outside the locked main gates, jumped over some railings and let himself in.

There, at the heart of the business which both built and destroyed him, he hung himself. Armed police arrived at the scene two hours later and discovered his lifeless body in the office.

Forensic investigations there and at the family home have now finished although West Mercia Police say it will be some time before they have pieced together the exact sequence of events. A spokesman refused to discuss alleged financial irregularities or the level of McFall’s debt.

Last night, floral tributes remained at the entrance to the St Martins business unit where the body of Hugh McFall was found by police. One, signed from Paula and Mal, said: ‘Alright boss man. Things will never be the same without you.’

For friends and relatives of Sue and Frankie McFall, those words must carry a hollow ring.