Different Worlds

[lifetime fan]

The ex's parents had a £75k overdraft on their current account.

[Jarvinja Ilnow]

 

Well worth reading, anyway, but there's a chapter about this article (it's quite long if you can bother reading it):

 

 

 

'I've thought about doing myself in loads of times ...'

 

In August, Christopher Foster shot dead his wife and daughter, turned his mansion home into an inferno and then killed himself. Why? Jon Ronson talks to friends and peers of the bankrupt millionaire to try to find out

 

Maesbrook, Shropshire, is a beautiful, well-to-do village on the Welsh borders. The houses are vine-covered Georgian mansions. The cars parked in the driveways are Range Rovers and Porsches. The people of Maesbrook are, by and large, self-made millionaires from Birmingham and Wolverhampton, entrepreneurs who've made it big.

 

"I'd love to live somewhere like this if I could afford it," I think ruefully as I drive through the village, closely tailed by a police car. The police have been following me ever since they spotted me reading the condolence bouquets on the road outside the grand Osbaston House.

 

On August 26, the mansion's owner, Christopher Foster, returned from a neighbour's barbecue and meticulously destroyed everything he owned. At some point he made the decision to include his family in that. He shot his wife, Jill, in the back of her head in their bedroom. He did the same to his 15-year-old daughter, Kirstie, in her bedroom, interrupting her as she chatted with friends on Bebo. He shot the horses and the dogs, and he jammed a horsebox against the gate and shot out the tyres, presumably to stop potential good Samaritans from intervening. He flooded the mansion with oil, set everything on fire, and then shot himself. A few hours later, the bailiffs arrived, unaware that the possessions they were supposed to impound that day no longer existed.

 

"From a neighbouring family - absolutely stunned," read one bouquet. "You were all such a lovely family," read another.

 

According to his friends, Foster adored his family in a very ordinary way. He was apparently forever seen laughing and joking and cuddling them while watching TV, and so on, right up until the night he murdered them. I'm here because I want to immerse myself in Foster's world, meet his friends and peer group, and try to put his unfathomable actions into some kind of context.

 

I read the condolence cards for a few minutes and then a policeman pulls up.

 

"Can I help you?" he asks.

 

I show him my press card.

 

"You look too scruffy to be a journalist," he says.

 

We both laugh. Then I bid him farewell and drive away. Now the police are following me, past the gated mansion belonging to John Hughes, the millionaire luxury car dealer whose barbecue and clay pigeon shoot the Fosters attended a few hours before the murders, past their local, the Black Horse Inn, and towards my meeting with Foster's friend and blacksmith, Ian.

 

Had this been a working-class double murder-suicide, I don't think the police would have bothered following me all the way out of town, but Maesbrook is a rarefied, aspirational village, and they seem to want to make absolutely sure I've gone.

 

Once I'm out of the village limits, the police car turns around and I make the final part of the journey alone. Ian lives in Meifod, Powys. He's a friendly, welcoming, shaven-headed man with five horses and 11 acres. We sit in his kitchen. He makes me a cup of tea and says he keeps remembering a weird incident that occurred a month before the murders.

 

"Before I explain what it was," Ian says, "let me tell you something about Chris Foster. He was always busy, messing with the horsebox, cleaning it, fixing this or that, taking out trees. He was always home. I did wonder why he wasn't at work. I knew he was something to do with oil, and everyone called him the Millionaire, but he was always home. He kept his barn spotless."

 

"That's weird," I say, in a dark chuckle, "to keep a barn spotless."

 

"I keep mine spotless, too," Ian says.

 

"Oh, well, not weird..." I say.

 

"Let me show you my barn," Ian says. "And then I'll tell you about the weird thing that happened a month before the fire."

 

On the way to the barn I tell him what I've learned about why Foster was always home. In 1997, he had a eureka moment. He invented, and patented, a new chemical formula.

 

"It came to him in a flash," said Terence Baines, who'd been his accountant back then. I had phoned Terence shortly before leaving for Shropshire. "Before then, he was just an ordinary bloke from Wolverhampton," Terence said, "a salesman, living in Telford, working for some company that went bust. But one day he suddenly thought, 'Hang on. If I get a bit of this and a bit of that, a bit of special rubber and plastic, and put it all together, it'll make a new type of oil rig insulation.'"

 

Foster called his invention UlvaShield. It won an apparently fantastically rare A1 fire-test rating. Where other oil rig insulations burst into flames, UlvaShield just formed a safe, crisp shell. The big oil companies began placing orders.

 

"The company went great guns," Terence continued. "Chris started dressing very smartly. He wanted to present himself well. He liked good holidays, a decent car..."

 

Actually, he bought a fleet of decent cars - two Porsches, an Aston Martin, a 4x4 for his wife (with the licence-plate Jill 40) and a tractor for the mansion, Osbaston House, that he'd bought in Maesbrook. He was doing an extreme version of what an awful lot of people were doing back then: living on credit, believing the boom would never bust. "He never planned on what things would be like when he was 65 or 70," Terence said. "It was always, 'What can I do now?'"

 

Along with the mansion and the cars, there were the affairs. Foster had at least eight mistresses, according to Jill's sister, Anne Giddings. "He had a big thing about blondes," Giddings later told the Sunday People. "Jill knew all about his affairs. There were lots of women on the scene. But she played the dutiful wife and kept quiet. He wasn't a good-looking guy, but money did the talking. He was always flashing the cash - it seemed to give him confidence."

 

But then - inevitably - it all went bust. In 2003 Foster contracted a supplier, DRC, to manufacture UlvaShield exclusively. But by 2005 his liabilities were £2.8m higher than his assets, presumably because he'd spent so much on mansions and Porsches and guns and membership to various fancy clay pigeon shooting clubs. In desperation, Foster sourced a Californian supplier who could manufacture UlvaShield cheaper. DRC found itself lumbered with a warehouse full of UlvaShield it couldn't sell because it was patented to Foster. DRC sued and won.

 

At the Royal Courts of Justice, on February 28 2008, Lord Justice Rimer said Foster was "bereft of the basic instincts of commercial morality. He was not to be trusted." And so it all came crashing down. DRC took control of the UlvaShield patent. Foster may have been lacking in commercial morality, but he certainly knew how to invent a good new fireproof chemical formula. Under DRC's less flashy stewardship, UlvaShield has become a huge deal in the oil rig world, supplying to Exxon, BP, Shell and 39 other giants. Foster, meanwhile, suddenly found he had nothing to do but stay home and look after the horses and the 15 acres.

 

We reach Ian's barn. It really is spotless. The hay is as smooth as a freshly made bed at a posh hotel. "Our horses are our lives. They're everything to me and the children. I'm going through a divorce at the moment..."

 

"Anyway," I interrupt, "something weird happened a month before the murders...?"

 

"Oh yes," Ian says. "I was at Osbaston House when there was an almighty crash. A massive branch, as big as a tree, had come off a willow and crashed on to the path. Chris came running up. He said his tractor had been parked exactly where the branch had landed, but he'd decided for absolutely no reason to reverse it 40 yards out of the way a few minutes earlier. It was a lucky escape." Ian falls silent. Then he adds, "Although if it had hit him, it would have been a godsend for the other two."

 

"Is that the weird incident?" I ask.

 

"Yes," Ian says.

 

"It doesn't seem that weird," I say.

 

"Well think about it," Ian says.

 

Ian says it didn't strike him as weird either at first, "but after the murders I was just so gutted, I started obsessively watching the news... There was something about going to that place that was so nice. It was the welcome you had, from both of them, but especially Jill. She was bubbly, always had that same smile, always turned out very well, but not flash, just very well groomed. Kirstie was very quiet but polite. And Chris would always give you a big handshake." Ian pauses. "So I was watching the news, and I saw those pictures of the burnt-out tractor, and it hit me. Chris had had absolutely no reason whatsoever to move the tractor that day. He said it himself. He didn't reverse it up to anything. He just moved it. This was a man who invented a product. You have to be pretty active in your brain to invent something. And now he had so little in his life that he needed to fill his days by just moving a tractor up and down a path for no reason."

 

We head inside. Ian makes me another cup of tea. We sit in silence. Then Ian says, "What Chris did has put thoughts in my own head, I must admit."

 

"Sorry?" I ask.

 

"I empathise with Chris," Ian says. "And I feel guilty for empathising."

 

"What do you mean?" I ask.

 

"Don't get me wrong," Ian says. "There's no way I could harm my children. But I'm going through a divorce at the moment. It's looming. I probably seem normal and relaxed to you, but inside I'm finding it very stressful. My chest is real tight. I get this pain down here." Ian points to his left side.

 

"What's the point of keeping all that stress hidden away?" I ask.

 

"We're supposed to be manly," Ian replies. "We're not supposed to get upset. We're supposed to be the breadwinners and the providers, especially in our children's eyes. We're supposed to do miracles."

 

As I sit in Ian's kitchen, it suddenly makes sense to me that Chris Foster would choose to shoot Jill and Kirstie in the back of their heads. It was as if he was too ashamed to look at them. Maybe the murders were a type of honour killing, as if Foster simply couldn't bear the idea of losing their respect and the respect of his friends. I ask Ian if he thinks Foster planned his night of mayhem, or if it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. "Oh, he was meticulous that night," Ian says. "That's weeks of planning, isn't it?"

 

"When do you think he did the planning?" I ask.

 

"Probably in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep. That's when people's brains start thinking about that kind of thing, isn't it?"

 

A few weeks later, I drive to Hodnet, near Maesbrook, to the West Midlands Clay Pigeon Shooting Ground, where I'm due to meet Graham Evans, an old friend and shooting partner of Foster's. Clay pigeon shooting was one of Foster's great hobbies. He used to come to Hodnet every Tuesday night. It was, in fact, how he spent his last day on earth: clay pigeon shooting at his neighbour's barbecue.

 

On the way, it starts to rain and so, by the time I arrive, Graham Evans and the other shooters are crammed into the bar, passing the time until they can shoot by telling incredibly offensive jokes.

 

"What's the difference between a prostitute and crack cocaine?" says Bill (not his real name). "A prostitute can clean her crack and re-sell it."

 

Everyone laughs. There are an awful lot of tasteless jokes floating around here today. In fact, the minute I arrived at the club - practically before I was out of the car - someone asked if I knew the one about the black woman in the sauna. Then there was the sign on the gate of the pretty, wisteria-covered farm next door to the shooting range: "Every third traveller is shot. The second has just left." In the old days, I think, jokes such as these were intended to display superiority, but now they seem to do the opposite. Although this is a lovely, rustic and quite posh shooting club, the men here seem a bit sad and ground down.

 

"I'm sure there are jokes we can do about Fossie," says a club member called Simon (not his real name). "Let's see. Did you hear the one about the barbecue that ran out of Fosters...?" Everyone looks at Simon.

 

"...Um..." he says. He falls silent. "That doesn't really work," he says.

 

"I can understand why Fossie might want to kill himself," Bill says. "I've thought about doing myself in loads of times..."

 

Nobody seems at all surprised by this blunt admission, so casually made. Who knows: maybe Bill is always going on about killing himself. Or maybe lots of the men here have considered the option. There are racks of rifles for sale all over the place - Berettas and Winchesters and so on. Perhaps being in proximity to so much weaponry invariably turns a man's mind to thoughts of suicide.

 

"I even know the place where I'd do it," Bill continues. "There's a lovely spot up over there on that hill near the satellite dish."

 

There are a few murmurs along the lines of, "That is a nice spot."

 

"But to shoot your own daughter..." Bill says. He trails off.

 

"Anyway," Graham Evans says. "The rain's stopped. Do you want a go at shooting?"

 

"OK," I say.

 

We head outside. Graham hands me a shotgun. I aim, shout, "Pull!" and proceed effortlessly to blow to pieces every clay pigeon that has the misfortune to fly past my magnificence. I'm a natural at this, and clay pigeon shooting turns out to be an incredibly exciting thing to do.

 

Suddenly, lots of the other shooters start yelling, "Whoa! Whoa! Jon! Steady on!"

 

"What?" I say, perplexed.

 

"You're doing this," says Graham. He does an impersonation of a crazed psycho waving a gun terrifyingly around.

 

"I am not," I say.

 

"You are," half-a-dozen shooters say in unison.

 

The truth is, holding a gun does something to you. It awakens in you some weird, dormant, fetishistic man-gene. You feel alive and special. You feel - as Homer Simpson once said - like God would feel if he was holding a gun.

 

Graham says it's great to see me so invigorated, and adds that if I want even more excitement, I should try shooting pheasants. "Pheasants have minds of their own," he says, "so that's rewarding. The best time to shoot them is at the end of October, a few weeks into the season, because they've already been shot at and survived. So they're wise then, you see?"

 

And then it starts raining again so we rush back indoors and pass the time window-shopping the guns for sale. The conversation turns back to Foster. Graham says he was a really impressive sight, turning up in his Porsche every Tuesday night. He says everyone knew he was loaded, "but around here people aren't prejudiced against that sort of thing. Fossie was a good guy. A good shot. He called me El Supremo." Graham pauses, sadly. "He loved guns," he says. "He had hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of them. He was a real collector."

 

On my way home, I drive once more through posh little Maesbrook. All the talk on the radio is of the credit crunch. They're interviewing Oliver Letwin and Harriet Harman. Both admit, quite sheepishly, that they have no savings, only overdrafts.

 

"I wish it weren't so," Letwin says, "and incidentally I wish people in Britain were all saving more. I know I ought to, but my wife and I are too extravagant and we should cut back."

 

The police followed me out of the village last time I was here, in part because I seemed too scruffy for these exclusive, nouveau riche surroundings, but it dawns on me that perhaps - like Letwin - the people of Maesbrook actually have nothing but overdrafts and all these fancy cars and mansions are just an illusion. Maybe, with my meagre savings, I'm the richest man in town.

 

Less than a month after the murders at Maesbrook, yet another father wiped out his family, this time in Southampton. His name was David Cass. He smothered his two daughters, telephoned his estranged partner, Kerrie Hughes, told her that the children had "gone to sleep for ever", hung up and hanged himself. They were apparently going through a messy break-up. In the US, according to the Department of Justice, a parent - usually a man - wipes out his family, and then himself, about once every week.

 

It's startling to hear Foster's friends talk about how they empathise with his actions. I wouldn't have guessed how on the edge people in this Shropshire enclave can be, and how easy it is - when lives start to go wrong, when their manhood and the trappings of their wealth are threatened - for the whole thing just to unravel.

[Pony Princess]

I just mean the amount of money. One can live a quality life without quite being "rich" as per. However time rich is a good point. How about being filthy money rich but you have AIDS....

 

I think you mean HIV mate. Pretty good daddy or chips actually: You become rich beyond your wildest dreams, but you have HIV (tick-tock, 15+ years left to live maybe?).

 

If you are rich and you have AIDS you are like, about to die. That is a shit daddy or chips!

[Jarvinja Ilnow]

I think you mean HIV mate. Pretty good daddy or chips actually: You become rich beyond your wildest dreams, but you have HIV (tick-tock, 15+ years left to live maybe?).

 

If you are rich and you have AIDS you are like, about to die. That is a shit daddy or chips!

 

shit daddy or chips...