On the night of 21 November last year, Collin Reeves sat down on the stairs of his home in the Somerset village of Norton Fitzwarren and broke down in tears.
He was in a terrible place. Since leaving the army four years before, Reeves had flitted between unsatisfying jobs, missing the structure and sense of purpose he had found in the military and dwelling on the horrors he had seen in Afghanistan.
He had found the Covid lockdowns difficult and worried he would not be able to support his wife and two children. The final straw had come that evening when his wife, Kayley Reeves, said she wanted a trial separation.
What Reeves did next was cruel and devastating. He caught sight of a framed commando dagger he had been presented with when he left the army, removed it from its mount and went outside.
Using the skills he had learned on the elite commando course, Reeves slipped unseen into the garden of his neighbours Jennifer and Stephen Chapple, a coffee shop worker and a teacher respectively, with whom he had fallen out over parking – the sort of trivial row that takes place in countless streets.
He walked into their living room and murdered both, shouting: “Die, you fuckers, die!” He stabbed each of them six times. Mercifully, their two children did not wake and were whisked away by police officers after Reeves dialled 999 to confess.
Relations between the two families had been cordial until the Chapples got a second car. Each house on their street had only one designated parking spot and Jennifer Chapple began to park on an undesignated area that did not block Reeves’s spot but made it slightly trickier for him to manoeuvre. Reeves took umbrage and in May 2021 confronted her aggressively and told her: “You can’t park there.”
Jennifer Chapple was concerned enough to contact the police. She told a friend: “He’s ex-military so he definitely thinks he should get what he wants.” She messaged another: “The developers didn’t take into account that people would want to park in front of their own houses … apparently it’s the biggest deal in the world to [Reeves] and he’s made it a personal vendetta.”
The housing association that part-owns the Reeves and Chapple houses, LiveWest, was alerted and sent out a note advising residents: “We advise that you only park in your allocated parking space.”
Tensions grew. During the pandemic, Reeves took a job as a security guard at Hinkley Point, where a nuclear power station is being built, but quit, unable to shake off the feeling he was under surveillance from the cameras there.
On 11 November, 10 days before the killing, Reeves launched a torrent of abuse at Jennifer Chapple, swearing at her and insulting her. Again, she reported this to the police.
She messaged a friend expressing frustration that little had been done after she contacted police in May. “I called them before because he tried this before and they did jack shit.” She described him as a “trained killer” who “gets off on how I react to his popping off”.
A police community support officer contacted her. She said she did not want any formal action taken but wanted her concerns put on record. The officer flagged up the situation with LiveWest.
On the day of the killings, Reeves took his children to see Christmas lights being turned on and stopped off at a war memorial to remember fallen comrades. Shortly after 9pm, Reeves carried out the attack. When he was booked into custody he gave his military serial number and said it had been an “operation”.
Reeves was to say that he could not remember the killing but was triggered into action by the bright white of the Chapples’ security light flashing on, reminding him of flares in a war zone.
He described being stationed in Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and witnessing colleagues being brought back from patrols horrifically wounded. His troop commander had been killed. He said after his tour he had not been given time to “decompress”.
In the witness box, Reeves said he had been physically abused as a boy and had had suicidal thoughts since he was 12. He said he joined the army aged 17 and had been proud to pass the commando course. He accepted he was a “trained killer”, though had not actually killed while in the army. He argued that he must have been suffering an “abnormality of mental functioning” at the time of the killing.
Speaking after the verdict, DI Neil Meade, the senior investigating officer, said he did not buy Reeves’s claims that he was mentally unwell. He did not believe Reeves had planned the attack but, catching sight of the dagger as he sat on the stairs, had acted spontaneously. “He saw his life falling apart and acted.”
The force’s handling of Jennifer Chapple’s concerns about Reeves has been investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct but it is not expected to find that officers did anything wrong. “Nobody could have predicted what happened,” Meade said.
Two psychiatrists examined Reeves and diagnosed depression but not severe mental illness. He told one that life “felt dark all the time” and she judged that he had “regressed” to his training at the time of the attack.
The jury at Bristol crown court was told there was no dispute that Reeves killed the Chapples. The only issue was whether his plea of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility could be accepted. Their verdict shows that they, too, did not buy Reeves’s explanation for his brutal attack.
