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The Sunday Times Magazine • 1716 • The Sunday Times Magazine

The names of Britain’s youngest double murderers, Kim Edwards and Lucas Markham, were released this month. Katie Glass charts how two 14-year-old lovers descended into savagery

The defendants were so young that the court took the unusual decision to refer to them only by their fi rst names: Lucas and Kim . The barristers and judge dispensed with their usual wigs and gowns. The baby-faced killers sat in the secure dock behind Perspex screens, separated by two security guards.

Kim, smooth-faced with fi ne blonde hair and a slight frame, wore a cardigan and leggings. She showed little emotion during the trial except when the verdict was read and she sobbed. Lucas never looked her way. Soft-mouthed, with sandy hair and a round, stubble-free

KILLER TEENSKILLER TEENSWHY DID THIS GIRL AND HER BOYFRIEND MURDER HER MUM AND SISTER?

face, he looked even more childlike than she did. The youngest couple ever convicted of double murder in Britain, they were 14 when they plotted and killed Kim’s mother and little sister .

The evidence was harrowing. Over fi ve days last October , Nottingham Crown Court heard how, that April, Kim had watched as her boyfriend, Lucas, stabbed to death her mother, Elizabeth Edwards , 49 , and her 13 -year-old sister, Katie , as they slept. How blood splattered the walls and covered the fl oor and the beds. How they had planned for him to target their voice boxes, so they could not scream out. How Lucas had entered his girlfriend’s mother’s room and, kneeling astride her, pinning her down, held a pillow over her face and stabbed her through the neck. Cut marks that the pathologist found on Elizabeth’s hands showed how she had struggled to defend herself.

Next, Lucas crept into Katie’s room. Kim later told police how she had listened as her sister screamed

HEARTS OF DARKNESS The couple, far left, from Spalding in Lincolnshire, were sentenced to 17½ years in prison for fatally stabbing Liz and Katie Edwards, above, in 2016

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Kim Edwards gave two police interviews in which she tried. The Coronation Channel, she said, had been a “special place” for Lucas and herself. They took long walks along its banks and in fields nearby. Lucas’s Facebook profile picture still shows them together, beneath the trees, Kim’s blonde hair swept messily to the side as she grins toothily at the camera. Lucas is smiling more shyly.

“They were absolutely besotted with each other,” Holvey says. “No one else mattered. She was his life and he was her life. When they were arrested, they wanted to be together, but we couldn’t allow that.”

Kim first saw Lucas in September 2013, in an English lesson at Sir John Gleed School (now Spalding Academy). He was hurling a chair across the room. They met properly while queuing for an IT lesson in spring 2015. Within months, he asked her out on Facebook. Kim was popular — friends describe her as “funny and happy-go-lucky”. She’d mess around, eating Oreos in class, and join them on shopping trips to New Look, trying make-up in Superdrug, buying false nails “so she would appear more grown up”.

Lucas, by contrast, was seen as a loner and a bully who struggled to fit in. “I liked her,” Jane Blandford recalls, “but I couldn’t understand her boyfriend.” In Jane’s view, Kim was “nice, sweet, kind ... Always seems like an angel, and he’s always the devilment, out there looking for mischief. I think that’s what she got out of the relationship. She thought everyone else was boring, whereas he was a rebel.”

If Kim and Lucas seemed superficially different, they shared profound similarities. Behind the doors at Dawson Avenue, life was more complex than the neighbours knew. As a young child, Kim had watched her mother suffer domestic abuse at the hands of her father, Peter Edwards, a welder, described in court as an “abusive drug addict”.

Peter did not respond to interview requests, but after Kim’s arrest, he posted on Facebook: “To many kids prisons. Some times respect comes from a good-hiding [sic]”. The family broke down when Kim

was two. Through Facebook I contacted her elder half-sister, Mary, who told me Peter “was very abusive to my mum” and that they had been in “several refuges” growing up. Liz — originally from Edinburgh — moved between refuges and kept the girls from Peter before deciding to move to Spalding. By then, Mary was old enough to have left home.

When Kim was six, she came to the attention of social services. During an argument over a broken television, Liz “completely lost it” and punched Kim in the face. Liz referred herself to social services, and Kim and Katie spent four months with a foster family. They returned home, but Kim’s issues with her mother remained. In 2013, aged 12, Kim wrote to her caseworker saying her mother favoured her sister and that “made me feel like shit”. She told support workers her mother had tried to strangle her, although Liz denied this. In February 2015, Kim confided in a teacher that she felt “lonely and depressed”. “I feel like no one cares ... I have tried to be strong for so long, but now I see death is the only way.” The teacher referred her to child and adolescent mental health services, which reported a “concern level” of only 2/10.

Interviewed by police after her arrest, Kim spoke quietly in a monotone voice. “I never got on with my mum — she always favoured my sister,” she said, describing Katie as a “blonde angel” and herself as “a train wreck. I’ve been a disaster from day one.” She believed that if she had been allowed to see her father, “I would have been his favourite”. In court, the child psychiatrist Dr Indranil Chakrabarti noted Kim’s emotional vulnerability and “significant attachment problem” with her mother.

Lucas was just four years old when his mother, Anne, died from leukaemia aged 29. He’d regularly known violence at home and moved between foster homes, rarely seeing his father, a violent drinker from a travelling background. He later moved in with his aunt. The psychiatrist Dr Oliver White suggested in court that Lucas’s childhood experiences had prevented him from

developing the ability to self-regulate his emotions. After his arrest, Lucas told police that he “didn’t really like adults”.

Kim told police interviewers that when she spent time with Lucas, she felt “happy for once”. She added: “Until he came along, no one had ever listened to my thoughts. It was the closest I’ve ever felt to anyone.”

Lucas’s barrister, Simon Myerson QC, told the court that he and Kim were “one person ... His personality disorder involves him attaching himself so deeply to the girl that he does not see himself as a separate individual.” They spent every day together, walking along the

Coronation Channel, past the disused railway bridge and the sewage works. These were surroundings where only teenagers could fall in love. They hung out at McDonald’s, where local children congregate at the tables in their uniforms after school. Kim wrote in her pink diary: “I want to be cremated and I want [our] ashes to be scattered in our special place.”

They shared the same attitude towards life — Kim told court psychiatrists they thought “it was shit ... and only going to get worse”. On Facebook they were openly infatuated, posting notes beneath each other’s pictures: “Beautiful like always xxxx” (Lucas, July 2015); “Perfectness xxxx (Lucas, December 2015).

They shared personal issues, too. A friend on Facebook made a poster that read: “We’ve all got battle scars”. Underneath, there was a rainbow of troubles: red, for self-harm; orange, for anxiety; yellow, for eating disorders; green, for bullied; teal, for panic attacks; blue, for depression; black, for considered or attempted suicide. “Orange, green, blue, teal, black...” Kim wrote. “Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, real [presumably teal] and black,” Lucas said.

Liz disapproved of the relationship. “He was disruptive in class,” Blandford says. “Kim’s grades were suffering.” Liz was worried that Lucas was “controlling and

“Get off me!” in a strange, frightening voice, sounding croaky. And “I can’t ...” — but she couldn’t say the word “breathe”. Lucas had cut her vocal cords. Afterwards, Kim and Lucas shared a bath and watched the Twilight films. They were found two days later, when police broke into the house.

In October, Lucas and Kim were ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years in prison each, later reduced to 17½ years. Handing out the sentences, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave said the case had “few parallels in modern criminal history”. “They should lock them up and throw away the key,” said one neighbour from their home town of Spalding.

Spalding sits in the low flats of Lincolnshire, cut through by the River Welland. The fields here once bloomed so brightly that Spalding’s Flower Parade attracted thousands of day trippers. Now mainly eastern European migrants come seeking agricultural work. The town centre is a mix of Polish shops and cheap high-street stores. What remains of the town’s grand history are the red-brick townhouses bordering the riverside walk, where in summer blue-and-white water taxis sail under weeping willows.

At the eastern edge of Spalding lies another stretch of water. The Coronation Channel hugs the Royce Road estate. In winter, its muddy banks are deserted save for the occasional dog walker and rusting beer cans. The odd Union Jack flutters from windows nearby. The Edwards family had lived nearby on Dawson Avenue for more than 10 years in an unassuming two-up, two-down. It is a neighbourhood where sofas slump in front gardens and kids play on the street. “It is a not a well-to-do area,” says the Rev Mike Chesher, former vicar of St Paul’s, the nearby church , “but it’s quite tightly knit. I liked the people because they were straight and unpretentious.”

Neighbours knew Elizabeth — or Liz — well. She volunteered at a charity shop and with the church’s children’s choir and theatre. She “got very enthusiastic about it — so much so that sometimes I had to rein her in a bit”, Chesher jokes. “She would just laugh and get on with things.” Liz was “committed” and “a person of integrity”, he adds. “She was a mother and her maternal instincts enabled her to understand when a child was under the weather and needed support or reassurance.”

He recalls how her youngest daughter, Katie, had appeared in the church production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and how One More Step Along the World I Go was Katie’s favourite hymn. They played it at her funeral.

Liz had been with her partner, Graham Green, for 10 months when she died. Every week, he drove from his home in Rugby to see her and they would go to the Sunday service at St Paul’s. He comes to the door bleary-eyed when I call. A truck driver who works nights, he planned to marry Liz and

move in with her. The Christmas before her death they had bought a puppy, Bebe. “She was my rock and I was her ‘grumpy Graham’,” he has said.

Liz’s favourite colour was purple. She got dimples when she laughed. There’s a video of her in the kitchen at Dawson Avenue, dancing to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a Christmas apron. It was taken four months before she was killed.

“Liz was a really nice, happy lady — we’d always have a laugh and a joke,” says the family’s neighbour Jane Blandford as we sit in her kitchen. “She was very kind. If she could help you, she would.” Jane often saw Liz with her daughters. “I called them Midget [Katie] and K [Kim]. Midget was a gorgeous child.” Katie, almost two years younger than Kim, had wavy gold hair and a smile nobody forgot.

Another resident opens a door at Dawson Avenue, wearing a furry polka-dot nightgown, and agrees to tell me about Liz. “She was funny, kind, an absolutely beautiful person. And Katie. Every time you saw her face, no matter how low you felt — her smile ...” She starts to cry. “It used to light up your day.”

Liz “thought the world of the girls”, the neighbour says. She’d been a single mum for years, but was “fantastic. I never saw any friction between them — I mean, yeah, kids are kids, aren’t they? All teenagers ... you have your moments.” She pulls her dressing gown tighter. “It has absolutely devastated the area. You dread saying your address. Even now, you think to yourself, ‘Why? Why hurt another human being in that way?’ ”

The last day of Elizabeth Edwards’s life was Wednesday April 13. She went to St Paul’s school, where she worked as a dinner lady, before coming home to her girls. Sometime before midnight, she and Katie went to

bed. Two days later — after Graham had reported her missing — police broke into the house, where they found Liz and Katie’s dead bodies.

Katie had been stabbed twice, Liz eight times; her jugular vein was slashed so violently, the windpipe was almost severed. Katie’s body was found beside her toys, which she’d laid out nearby.

“It was just so unreal,” says Detective Chief Inspector Martin Holvey, who led the investigation. “On the Saturday evening, my detective sergeant rang and I’ll never forget his words. You think that in 30 years you have heard everything, then he recounted what happened. I just sat there in my office and thought, ‘I can’t believe this. I don’t want to believe it.’”

“There is no single explanation for why children commit violent crime,” says Dr Jean-Baptiste Pingault, a lecturer at University College London’s Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology. “It’s a conjunction of so many factors and a bit of randomness. All you can do is try to consider all the evidence and make the best story you can.”

Pingault studies the processes underlying abnormal child development. He says there are reliable risk factors that can lead to violent crime. Situational factors within the family: divorce, maltreatment or harsh parenting, toxic relationships. The bonds children form among themselves are particularly important in adolescence, reinforcing and incentivising extreme behaviour. “In this case, there is almost certainly a very unusual conjunction of a lot of risk factors,” says Pingault. “But you will never have a definitive answer. It’s just a story you make to better understand it.”

“Should I explain it all?” After her arrest,

toxic mix Both disturbed by difficult upbringings, the couple found solace in each other community spirits Liz and Katie had close ties to the local school and church in spalding. they were murdered in their beds at home

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possessive”. Blandford recalls that when she met Kim and Liz, they seemed close. “But everything did go a bit funny when [Kim] started getting into a relationship ... [Liz] said to me, ‘I don’t really want her to go out with him, but I can’t make her see how he’s not any good.’ ”

On one occasion, Blandford saw Kim with a black eye and a fat lip. “They said it was a trampoline accident. I said, ‘That’s not that boy?’ Everybody just shrugged their shoulders and put it under the carpet.”

Kim’s friends were concerned that Lucas was a bully. One posted a screen grab on Facebook of a series of text messages that Lucas had sent her. “Slag”, “slut”, “dumb dumb”, they read. “Bitch”, “attention seeker”, “retard”, “f****** idiot”.

Blandford claims that Lucas had been obsessed by another murder on the Royce Road estate. About 18 months before Liz and Katie were murdered, Warren Free — a 42-year-old father of two with learning difficulties — died of head injuries after confronting a gang of youths who had been tormenting him. Six teenagers were cleared of his death after defence lawyers argued they had acted in self-defence or been innocent bystanders.

In October 2015, Kim and Lucas ran away together. Heading off on their bikes after school, they took a tent, a carrier bag of clothes and some food. Liz was “frantic”, Blandford says. “Nobody knew where to look — they covered the riverbanks, police went around houses, searched parks and put notices in the press.” When the police returned Kim home, Liz grounded her and banned Lucas from the house. “It was fear more than anything. She was afraid that, next time, she might not be so lucky.”

In March 2016, matters reached a crisis point. Lucas’s uncontrollable behaviour saw him excluded from school and sent to a unit for disruptive pupils. Kim told psychiatrists that her life had become “like a living, walking hell”. She attempted suicide by taking an overdose and was admitted to hospital. A report by Lincolnshire county council suggested she needed professional help “sooner rather than later”. Not long afterwards, she put a photograph of herself on Facebook, eyes downcast, expression blank. “Where’s your beautiful smile?” Liz wrote. “It disappeared,” Kim replied. It is the last picture Kim posted.

Peter Edwards claims he tried to gain custody and access to his daughters. He had reconnected with Kim, who argued with Liz about seeing him. In one row, Liz told Kim she would turn out just like him. Kim fled to Lucas’s house, where they barricaded

themselves in his room. In order to separate them, Lucas’s family had to rugby tackle and restrain him. Afterwards, he found they had cleared his bedroom out.

When Kim returned home, she saw that her mother had bagged up her possessions from her bedroom, giving some to Katie. Afterwards, Kim said it was clear she “did not belong to the family any more”. That weekend, they began planning the murder.

Kim and Lucas met “night after night”, walking along the Coronation Channel and sitting in McDonald’s, where staff served Happy Meals as they discussed how they would kill Liz, Katie and then themselves. “He was joking,” Kim told the police. “Then he realised I wasn’t joking. Then he said he wasn’t joking either and it escalated from there.” Kim said she “carried on as normal at school ... No one knew about the plan.” The court heard that Lucas saw his role as trying to protect Kim. “Lucas just hates me being upset. He didn’t like my mum or my sister for that reason,” she told the police.

On April 13, Lucas made his way, in the dark, along the muddy banks of the Coronation Channel. He shuffled down an alley at the back of Kim’s house, scaling a fence before climbing the single-storey extension to tap on the bathroom window three times, as arranged, so Kim could let him in.

Lucas was carrying a backpack containing

four kitchen knives. They whispered, as Liz and Katie slept upstairs. “He said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ ” Kim later told the police. “I said yes, but then in the end I couldn’t do it, so he did.” They had planned for Kim to kill Katie, but after watching Lucas kill her mother, she “didn’t want to see any more” and hid in the bathroom. “If I was a lot stronger and a bit more mentally capable, I would have murdered them,” Kim said. “But I don’t think I could myself take away all of their thoughts and dreams and memories. I don’t think I could ever take that away from someone myself.”

Afterwards, they shared a bath as Kim worried that Bebe, the puppy, would smell blood. Kim changed into her Minions pyjamas and Lucas prepared a meal of teacakes and ice cream. Having hauled Kim’s mattress downstairs, they lay on it and watched Twilight vampire films. This was where police found them when they broke in two days later. Liz and Katie’s bodies were upstairs; Bebe was cowering in her crate.

The psychiatrist Dr Philip Joseph told the court that the murders would not have occurred without the couple’s “toxic relationship” and their fear that Liz was trying to split them up. He compared the pair to Bonnie and Clyde, but they seem to have regarded themselves as more like Twilight’s Edward Cullen and Bella Swan — a schoolgirl who falls in love with a man forced to be a monster. Teenagers sharing dark secrets, whose families disapprove of their love.

At Nottingham Crown Court in October last year, Lucas pleaded guilty to murder. Kim admitted manslaughter, suggesting that mental illness had diminished her responsibility. The psychiatrist Chakrabarti claimed a “series of stressful events” caused Kim to suffer from an adjustment disorder, impairing her “rational judgment”. The jury concluded that Kim still formed intent to kill and found her guilty of murder.

The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10 — the lowest in the European Union. “No other country in Europe gives a life sentence to a child,” says Penelope Gibbs, director of the charity Transform Justice. “In other countries, they wouldn’t even be in the criminal system but the welfare process.” New sentencing guidelines, published in March, advise taking the social backgrounds of young offenders into account when sentencing them. Meanwhile, child protection experts have started a serious case review to examine the role that social services, teachers and mental health services played in Kim and Lucas’s lives.

At Dawson Avenue, a new family have moved into the Edwards’s former home. “Eastern European,” says a neighbour. “We all knew an English family wouldn’t move in.” Fresh potted plants now bloom by the lawn, where once bouquets and teddy bears lay in memory of Katie and Liz n

They shared a bath, Kim changed into her Minions pyjamas and they watched Twilight vampire films

mixed messages Liz showed concern at her daughter’s unhappy mood on Facebook