The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-29)

The Sunday Times May 29, 2022 21

NEWS REVIEW

She raised her concerns with the

scenes-of-crime officer on the case, who

admitted it was a “strange one”.

She asked the police team for more

examinations to be carried out on the bag

and weapons, but they came back

“inconclusive”. The bag had been han-

dled too many times by officers, making it

evidentially useless. Police had already

made up their minds: Howard was the

killer.

The story of the Ainsworths might

have ended there. But then, three years

later, on a cold afternoon in November

1999, Hurst arrived at Macclesfield Hospi-

tal’s mortuary to go through the death

reports that had come in overnight. She

had just been promoted to senior coro-

ner’s officer for Cheshire and was now in

charge of a sizeable team.

A mortuary technician opened a fridge

door and pulled out a stack of tiers where

the bodies lay. Hurst was there for a stan-

dard ID check on a person who had died

on a hospital ward over the weekend.

That’s when she saw the body of Auriel

Ward. Hurst could hardly believe what

she was seeing. Those wounds. The

blunt-force trauma combined with in-

juries from a sharp implement. She had

seen it all before.

“It was a murder-suicide,” said the

technician. “Elderly married couple.”

“Where did they live?” Hurst asked.

When the technician said Wilmslow, in

a street round the corner from the Ain-

sworths’ house, her jaw hit the floor.

She raised the link with investigators

assigned to the Wards’ case. It was the

same old story. “Leave it alone, Miss

Marple. It’s all in hand,” was the attitude

of the male detectives.

As with the Ainsworths, police would

blame the husband, Donald, for killing

Auriel before taking his own life — appar-

ently by slashing his throat and stabbing

himself in the groin, wrists and heart.

Hurst didn’t believe it. Why would

Donald do it? Why kill Auriel? There was

no motive. Not a shred of evidence to sug-

gest why he might stab and beat his wife

to death after 50 years of happy marriage.

But it would be 14 more years before

another investigator would take a look at

the Wilmslow killings and attempt to

establish the truth. That investigator was

Stephanie Davies, another coroner’s offi-

cer for Cheshire police. Davies was 35

years younger than Hurst, more hot-

headed and less perturbed by risk, but

the two women were friends.

It was a spring day in June 2013 when

Hurst opened the door to her office in

Warrington town hall and showed Davies

a file on her desk. Marked “special inter-

est folder”, it was where Hurst kept

records of curious fatal cases in Cheshire

over the years. Baby deaths. Killings. Unu-

sual falls. She took out the files on the Ain-

sworths and the Wards to see what Davies

— who was trained in forensic science —

would make of them. Straight away,

Davies saw the lack of blood on Howard’s

pyjamas as a problem.

A

fter a week in Portugal on
holiday, Christine Hurst
arrived at her work in Mac-
clesfield police station to
find the cases on her desk
were stacking up. Hurst, a
coroner’s officer for Chesh-
ire police, opened two big
brown envelopes sitting in
her in-tray to find the crime
scene photographs for a murder-suicide
in Wilmslow.
The case involved a husband and wife,
Howard and Bea Ainsworth. Howard, 79,
was said by police to have murdered Bea,
78, with a hammer and a knife, and taken
his own life with a bag over his head.
She spread the photographs out on her
desk. She had never seen violence like it.
Hurst, aged 43 at the time, with short
flaxen hair, glasses, rounded cheeks and
a warm smile, had been doing this job for
the past three years. It had not been an
easy experience, especially when she
first arrived.
Her predecessors in the role had all
been retired police officers. She was a
civilian. And a woman. Life was made
difficult for her at first — sexist com-
ments, misogyny and sexual harassment
were rife in Cheshire police in the mid-
1990s.
In many ways Hurst was a gentle soul.
But there was a toughness to her. Push
her and she would push back, harder.
Her career in the force would eventually
span 23 years and included advising the
government on coronial reform in the
wake of the Harold Shipman inquiry.
But now she was just starting out, and
this was a case she would never forget.
Almost immediately, Hurst had prob-
lems with Howard being the killer. He was
supposed to have died by suffocating
himself with a bag over his head. But
there was something in the pathologist’s
report that remained unexplained.
Dr Williams could not say how Howard
had sustained bruises across his upper
lip. It didn’t fit with the suicide method.
But Hurst had seen similar injuries — in
cases of asphyxiation. Marks caused, for
example, by a person clamping their
hand around your mouth and nose.
Something else troubled her. Bea’s
nightdress had been yanked up over her
hips to expose her pubic area. It was the
ultimate indignity. Why would Howard
have done such a thing to his wife? There
was no evidence of any domestic abuse in
the marriage. Everyone who knew them
said they were happy.
The detectives believed that Howard
was carrying out an act of euthanasia. But
why? They were both in good health with
excellent finances. Indeed, the very core
principle of euthanasia was about achiev-
ing dignity in death. There was nothing
dignified about the death of Bea Ain-
sworth, in Hurst’s view.
Then there was the bottle of chlor-
methiazole tablets on Howard’s bedside
tablet. They are a short-acting sedative
and sleeping pill. Neither of the Ains-
worths was prescribed such a drug. So
where had it come from?
Hurst looked again at the crime scene
photographs. Howard’s pyjamas had
very little blood on them. But he had
apparently just murdered his wife with a
knife and hammer.

A coroner’s officer who questioned the police view that the brutal deaths of elderly couples

were murder-suicides ended up being the subject of an inquiry herself, writes David Collins

Neighbours and friends

described Howard and Bea

Ainsworth as a happy

couple. Both were in good

health and financially

secure yet police insist

Howard murdered his wife

with a hammer and knife

and asphyxiated himself

In an attack like that the killer’s hands,

sleeves and front should be covered with

spots of blood that have “tails”. But there

was nothing. Davies agreed with her

boss. Something didn’t look right. The

file on the Wards also contained red flags.

How had Donald, aged 69, managed to

kill himself by slashing his throat and

stabbing his heart? Was that even possi-

ble? And some of the wounds on his body

showed no signs of having bled. Perhaps,

she thought, because they were inflicted

after he was dead. Hurst confided that

she had kept the files in the hope that

someone would reinvestigate, and that’s

exactly what Davies decided to do.

She began to put together a review,

noting the many similarities between the

two cases. Both were happily married

couples with no history of domestic vio-

lence, health issues, money worries or

serious family concerns. Both couples

were found on the right-hand side of the

bed. In both cases the bodies had wounds

that didn’t stack up with evidence found

at the scene. In Auriel’s case, there was

some evidence of hammer marks on her

head but no hammer found at the scene.

Donald Ward had a slash to his hand —

suggestive of defensive wounds.

Davies also looked for other poten-

tially suspicious murder-suicides of eld-

erly couples, suspecting a pattern. She

found 39 between 2000 and 2019, mak-

ing them rare events. The fact there were

two in Wilmslow — population 25,000 —

made it a statistical anomaly.

O

ut of those 39 cases, just three

involved blunt and sharp force

trauma — and they were all in the

northwest of England. Two of them

were just a few miles away in south

Manchester. Davies argued that there

was enough evidence to link at least three

separate killings to the same person, sug-

gesting that a serial killer had been oper-

ating in Cheshire since at least 1996.

I learnt about the review when I was

working in a shed at the bottom of my gar-

den and received a telephone call from a

source who was in possession of the

highly sensitive report. By then Davies

had given it to the police on two occa-

sions, hoping they would agree to rein-

vestigate. The source who gave me the

document believed the force were trying

to “tuck it under the carpet”.

I read the 179-page document in one

sitting. The graphic violence of the

crimes was disturbing. Photographs of

married couples lying side by side in

twisted, bloodied bedsheets. The

women, in particular, had been the focus

of excessive violence: bludgeoned and

stabbed, wounds far in excess of what

was required to kill.

In August 2020 The Sunday Times ran

a story based on its findings, as part of an

Insight investigation. We called the pro-

posed murderer the “Silver Killer”, as he

would attack vulnerable older people in

their homes at night.

It seemed that the suspicions of the

women in the coroner’s office were

finally being taken seriously. But for

Davies, now 42 and with two commenda-

tions from the chief constable and lead-

ing a team of 13, that was the beginning of

a new ordeal. Shortly after our story ran,

her house was raided by detectives from

her own police force. Though I had made

it clear that the leak had not come from

her, the constabulary’s powers that be

were not happy her report had made its

way into the public domain.

Cheshire police had sent officers from

the dreaded professional standards

department — the real-life equivalent of

Line of Duty’s AC12 — to investigate. She

was investigated for misconduct in a pub-

lic office — a criminal offence that can

result in jail. Though the Crown Prosecu-

tion Service declined to prosecute, she is

still suspended on full pay while the force

completes an internal investigation.

Meanwhile, senior detectives continue to

refuse to reopen the case.

The Hunt for the Silver Killer, by David

Collins, is published by Simon & Schuster

at £18.99

There wasn’t a

shred of evidence

to suggest he

might stab his wife

after 50 years of

happy marriage

I tried to catch a serial killer

... now I could lose my job

Christine Hurst, above,

gave a file on the Wilmslow

deaths to Stephanie Davies

least it’s not exactly “bad” for

me, my hunger has gone and I

don’t feel bloated.

But could I make a habit of

it? Jonathan Fogel, 32, a

musician, has bought more

than 5,000 Huel meals in the

past five years, spending

about £7,500. Powders cost

from £1.50 per meal, a lot

cheaper than a daily coffee

and croissant at Pret. He now

drinks Huel for breakfast and

lunch seven days a week.

“I don’t have the mental

bandwidth to think about

food,” says Fogel. “Drinking

Huel throughout the day ticks

the boxes of nutritional value,

preparation time and

expense, and it means I can

focus on work.”

However, he is slightly

wary of being a guinea pig for

a newly invented food.

Nutritionist Stephanie

Moore shares Fogel’s

concern. She says chewing

food is not only essential for

oral hygiene, but also triggers

a biofeedback loop in which

the body produces enzymes

that balance stomach acid

and aid digestion. Forsaking

this could eventually lead to

health problems in the gut.

“Meal replacements are

synthetic and highly

processed,” she says. “What

Huel allows us to do is to stay

wrapped up in stress mode,

not really paying any

attention to what we’re

eating, getting it down us and

ticking the box of nutrition —

thinking we’ve done all we

need to. But we are missing

fundamental parts of what it

means to eat a proper meal.”

By the end of my Huel

experiment I have perfected

the ratios of water to powder

and identified the winners

(cookies and cream; chicken

and mushroom) and the

losers (strawberries and

cream).

But am I a fully fledged

Hueligan? Well, I won’t be

factoring it into my daily

routine, but it might be handy

to have for those bare-

cupboard, work-from-home

days. As for dinner tonight?

I’m craving Thai green curry.

A proper one.

Huel’s vegan ‘milkshake’

powder is a hit with busy

commuters, gym-goers

and Matt Hancock. But

Katie Gatens says it won’t

be replacing her proper

bowl of Thai curry just yet

with gym bods, time-shy

commuters and, err, Matt

Hancock, who was filmed

drinking it during a recent

interview.

The company has sold

more than 200 million

“meals”, and recent sales

figures are as healthy as its

shakes: £103 million in 2021

up from £72 million the year

before. You might expect to

find it based in Silicon Valley,

but the humble home of Huel

is an industrial estate in

Tring, Hertfordshire.

Suitably hyped, I decide to

give it a whirl for a week,

aiming for two meals a day. I

kick off with Thai green curry.

After sloshing boiling water

over green dust, I get a whiff

of lemongrass and ginger. It

looks like a highly viscous

soup with unappetising

coloured lumps of quinoa and

sweetcorn — part Cup-a-Soup,

part Pot Noodle.

Huel is a portmanteau of

“human” and “fuel”, but also

unfortunately sounds a bit

like “gruel”, which turns out

to be pretty spot-on. It has a

porridge-like texture, but it’s

not inedible by any stretch. I

check my phone to see if it’s

too late to order a takeaway.

For many Hueligans,

though, taste is not the

important thing — the appeal

is the simplicity.

“Food used to be about just

getting fuel in you to do what

you need to do — suddenly it’s

become a massive leisure

activity and you end up

eating all the wrong stuff,”

says Alan Pay, 54, from

I

have never had so much

attention in the staff

canteen. As I take out a

plastic bottle from my bag

emblazoned with the word

“Huel”, heads immediately

turn. One man gives me a

knowing nod, and another

comes to ask which flavour

I’m having for lunch.

To dudes in the know, Huel

is a vegan meal replacement

that promises to be

“nutritionally complete”,

with 26 vitamins and

minerals and 400 calories per

serving. Its USP? Cheaper and

healthier than an on-the-go

sandwich, while taking no

time to prepare. It’s lactose-

free, soy-free, gluten-free and

vegan. What’s left? A mixture

of oats, tapioca, flaxseed and

pea protein (though not as

much as in a protein shake)

among other things. Or, as I

describe it to my mum, a bit

like astronaut food.

It comes in the form of a

powder to which you add

water, which turns it into a

kind of milkshake drink. If

beige flavourless sludge is not

Drink up your dinner

— the meal in a bottle

fuelling fitness fans

It’s a viscous

and lumpy

mix of Pot

Noodle and

Cup-a-Soup

Katie Gatens

was not

entirely

convinced by

her Huel fuel

your bag, the company has

also brought out a range of

hot savoury meals, such as

madras and bolognese, plus

cereal bars. Its customers —

called Hueligans (groan) — are

literally lapping it up. They

have started donning it too:

last month the Huelwear

clothing line was launched.

Huel has quickly gaining a

cult following, mostly, to be

honest, among men.

Founded in 2015, it is a hit

Oxfordshire, an account

executive at a tech firm, who

first started eating Huel once

a day to lose a few pounds to

improve his cycling.

“I’m not sure if I’m totally

sold on the taste, to be

honest, and my wife doesn’t

like it. But it’s fine and I’m not

a fussy eater,” he adds.

In an effort to mix things

up, I opt for Huel’s iced coffee

caramel for breakfast, which

has an artificial sweetness

and claggy consistency that

sticks in my throat. After

reluctantly slurping down the

full bottle, knowing that at

LUCY YOUNG FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES