Holding a 2ft length of rope he'd found in the garage Lee Ford walked up behind his wife Lesley and strangled her to death. Over the course of the next 24 hours the jealous and controlling killer would go on to murder his four step-children in exactly the same gruesome manner.
He then wrapped their bodies in sheets, covered them in lime and buried them in the woodshed at the bottom of the garden. The murders, which are the subject of true crime documentary The Killer in My Family on Quest Red tonight (Saturday), lay undiscovered for a month as Ford, then 33, embarked on an elaborate cover-up.
Tragic Lesley and her children Sarah Jane, 17, Anne Marie, 16, Steven, 14, and Craig, 13, were last seen alive at the end of August 2000. Ford told friends and neighbours in the quiet Cornish hill village of Carnkie that Lesley, 36, had left him and taken the children with her.
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He cancelled a job interview, saying the family had gone down with food poisoning. He sent his two surviving children to stay with relatives and moved the youngest of his children to a new school, while continuing to live in his pebble-dashed bungalow.
He even attempted to cash in Sarah's last wage packet from McDonald's and made advances to a former girlfriend saying his wife had left him. And, days before the first body was found, Ford asked a neighbour if he could store some Christmas presents at his home so the children would not find them.
But when police visited Ford, after being contacted by Lesley's worried brother Peter Wyatt, the killer panicked and reburied the decaying bodies of Sarah and Anne Marie. He packed them in polythene and wore a face mask to shift them in his car boot from the woodshed to a potato field about four miles away.
He then took his and Lesley's two children to see their grandparents in Shropshire, intending to rebury the remaining three bodies. On October 4 police held a press conference and revealed that Ford and his two children had also gone missing.
Later that day Ford was arrested while driving across Bodmin Moor and the children were found safe. That night police discovered the first of the bodies.
Ford, who occasionally worked as a builder and a roofer and was said to have spent much of his time drinking in the local cricket club, confessed to the murders but never explained why he killed his family. Police speculated he snapped after Lesley discovered he had begun a sexual relationship with Sarah Jane.
Lesley had approached social services over fears about her husband and daughter, but Sarah Jane was never interviewed. Ford told police: "I do not know why or what went through me. Lesley was killed in the bedroom, the four in the kitchen.
"They were strangled from behind with a rope. They did not know it was coming and neither of them knew another one had gone before them.
"That my own hands have done what they have done to five people with a rope is a nightmare. I do not even understand why I did what I did. Somewhere amongst the argument I snapped."
Ford pleaded guilty to five murders. In May 2001 he was given five life sentences and told he would serve a minimum of 35 years in jail before being considered for parole. The 35 years was later reduced on appeal to 27.
Soon after police finished their investigations, the shed where Ford hid the dead bodies of his family was demolished by the bungalow's owners.
Nigel Pascoe QC, who prosecuted the case said: "This was not a crime of passion but of savagery. The sheer mechanics involved in five separate and virtually identical killings suggests a careful and planned homicide."
The Killer in My Family is on Quest Red at 9pm tonight (Saturday, May 6).
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