The weathered headstones on the gently sloping hillside of Rhydwilym cemetery in Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales, are smothered in ivy and lichen, mostly long forgotten. But one among them is stark and unmissable, with bright gold lettering on sharp black granite. Martha Mary Thomas, whom everyone called Patti, and her older brother, Griffith Morris Thomas, known as Griff, lived together at the farmhouse of Ffynnon Samson, in nearby Llangolman. They died there together, on 7 December 1976, when Patti was 70 and Griff was 73. They are buried together, in the same grave. On the day I visit, someone has left a posy of pink flowers for them, flattened against the dark stone by the driving rain.
Neither Patti nor Griff had married. They remained at Ffynnon Samson, the Thomas family home, all their lives. Their father died in 1967, leaving them alone together when they were in their 60s. The farm had earned them a good living, but they lived frugally on their pensions, spending their time at Rhydwilym chapel, and looking after their garden.
At 8.45am on Saturday 11 December 1976, the postman, Gareth Rossiter, noticed the envelopes and packages he had delivered to Ffynnon Samson on Thursday and Friday were still lying behind the back door. He pushed it open to find the lights on and curtains drawn. He called out for the Thomases, but heard no reply. Then he saw Griff’s charred body on the floor of the kitchen, surrounded by burned cushions. Griff’s face was bloodstained. He was dressed in the remnants of a brown scarf and blue donkey jacket; a package of cheese from the local shop was still in his jacket pocket. Patti was dead on a chair in the far corner of the living room. The television was on but lay overturned at her feet. Patti’s head, face and clothes were soaked in blood.
Griff and Patti were buried together less than a month later, on 3 January 1977. The Home Office pathologist, Owen Williams, concluded on 24 January that Patti’s death had been caused by a severe head injury – a depressed fracture of the skull – sustained through a series of blows from a heavy blunt instrument. Griff, too, had a head injury, but Williams ruled that he’d died from his burns.
The next day, 25 January, detective chief superintendent Pat Molloy, head of Dyfed-Powys CID, closed his investigation. The scene at Ffynnon Samson was “… indicative of a sudden, unpredictable outburst of violence between the two deceased”, he wrote in his report to John Johnson, the Haverfordwest coroner, leaked to local journalists. “I consider that the possibility of a third party being involved is so remote as to lead me to the conclusion that Mr Thomas killed his sister and died in a fire started by himself.” At the inquest into the Thomas’s deaths on 17 February, the coroner’s jury found Griff responsible for Patti’s manslaughter, returning an open verdict on his death. For the local and national press, this was simply a murder-suicide.
Today, local people are campaigning to have Griff’s body exhumed from their shared Rhydwilym grave; not to separate him from the sister the authorities say he killed, but to exonerate him. In April 2022, a vigil for Griff and Patti drew at least 50 people to this graveyard in their memory.
Did a row between two siblings in their 70s who had lived together all their lives end in lethal violence – or did someone else get away with double murder at Ffynnon Samson? And nearly five decades on from the tragedy, without any spouses, children, grandchildren or other close family to fight for their name, why does Griff and Patti’s story still matter so much to the people of Pembrokeshire?
* * *
Like much of this part of Wales, Ffynnon Samson has changed significantly since 1976. It’s no longer a farm; the outhouses have been converted into cottages and sold in their own right. The two-storey grey stone farmhouse has changed hands several times, having been repurposed as a holiday cottage with glamping. Many of the properties around here are now second homes, bought by people who don’t spend much time in the community. A llama farm has opened next to Rhydwilym, offering tourists Instagrammable treks in the Cleddau valley with the animals. A family-run dairy farm nearby now sells artisan gelato as well as fresh milk. It is another world from the one Griff and Patti knew.
“They were old-fashioned. Set in their ways,” Hywel Vaughan, 63, tells me next to the log-burning stove in the home he shares with his parents, Dillwyn, 86, and Nelly, 83, near Llangolman. The Vaughans used to raise cattle on Griff and Patti’s land, renting about 18 acres in 1976. “We were on the opposite side of the road from the house. The spring had dried because of the very hot summer of 1976, so we had to cart water down there. We were seeing them quite often.”
“Griff was rheumatic,” Nelly says.
“Stiff,” Hywel nods. “He was retired, but still pottering about, doing things, not much.”
“They were good people. Neighbourly,” Dillwyn remembers. “He was soft.”
“He treated the animals like his pets,” Nelly adds. She leans forward. “It was impossible. Impossible that he did it. That’s what’s troubling us, as a family. We can’t believe that he murdered her.”
“Didn’t he have cheese still in the pocket of his jacket?” Hywel asks. “He might have come home from the shop and stumbled across something.”
“No one would pass the farm unless he lived or had business in the area. The house would thus not be chanced upon (particularly in the dark, when their deaths must have occurred) by a would-be thief,” DCS Molloy wrote in his report to the coroner. (I found Ffynnon Samson easily; the farmhouse lies directly on the road between Llangolman and Rhydwilym). Molloy depicts Griff and Patti as an isolated, reclusive pair who rowed over money. “The general opinion that their relationship was harmonious must be viewed in the context that they lived in a detached house in a remote situation, 40 yards from their nearest neighbour. We are thus relying on what might have been merely outward appearances,” he continued. “A number of people who would not commit themselves in writing took a different view, namely that the couple quarrelled over money; Miss Thomas holding the reins and keeping her brother short.”
Molloy’s investigation is the product of a time before CCTV, mobile phone and DNA evidence, when policing relied on written records, local tip-offs and the instincts of experienced detectives. As such, his report is a mixture of keenly observed detail and hunches that look laughable today. He throws into doubt the possibility that a burglar killed the Thomases because dresser drawers were not left in disarray and the telephone cord was still connected: “Criminals who go to the homes of old, reputedly wealthy people to rob them will begin by ripping out the telephone wire.” But he is also able to determine that Griff and Patti died mid-evening on Tuesday 7 December, because Griff was last seen buying cheese at 4pm that day, failed to buy his usual paper on the morning of 8 December, and the plastic lens of the watch found on his body had melted, its hands fixed at 8.20. This maddening mix of precision and conjecture has made this widely circulated report notorious among local people.
Perhaps another product of its time – although one that arguably persists – is the depiction of Patti as a difficult woman, “rather short-tempered” and “the dominant partner”, who held the purse strings and may have “provoked” her brother into attacking her. A coin purse with a smear of blood was found on top of a dresser in the living room, “indicating that the purse had been handled during the fracas”. The only fingerprint on the purse was Griff’s. “I regard it as adding weight to the belief that no third party was involved,” Molloy wrote.
The Thomases had no one to spend their savings on but themselves. Like many people back then, they kept significant amounts of cash at home. The writing flap of the bureau in the room where Patti was found was left open, and the cash box in it was empty, but Molloy noted that £2,637.90 was found elsewhere at the property. Patti’s handbag had been left on the floor of her bedroom, containing a total of £543 in cash. If an outsider had come to Ffynnon Samson looking for money, they had left a lot behind.
But there are details in the report that do point to the presence of a visitor at Ffynnon Samson on the night Griff and Patti died. Two cups of barely sipped tea were found on the mantelpiece of the living room. A plate of bread and butter and some crisps had been left on a chair near the fireplace, with Patti’s fingerprints underneath the plate, as if she had brought in refreshments for a guest.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspects of the report relate to the weapons used to inflict the injuries found on Griff and Patti. Molloy concluded that the blunt instrument that killed Patti was very likely to have been the oak dining chair found in the kitchen close to the living room door: Patti’s blood was all over one of its legs. A sewing machine found three feet from Griff’s head was “completely covered” with Griff’s blood – beneath its wooden cover. “One might wonder,” Molloy pondered, “what kind of intruder would take the trouble to replace the sewing machine cover.” But there is no mention of any of Patti’s blood being found on Griff’s body – or of Griff’s debilitating arthritis. Did Griff hurt himself with the sewing machine? Could 70-year-old Patti have battered her 74-year-old brother with it, before he lifted up a heavy chair and fractured her skull, then surrounded himself with cushions and set himself alight?
“However badly wrong went an attempted robbery, I feel sure we would have found a more easily understood scene,” he concluded. “While anything is possible, I am persuaded by all this that there is no evidence of an intruder bent on robbery.” With these words, Molloy used circumstantial evidence – and the lack of it – to pin Patti’s death on a man who could never protest his innocence.
“The old furniture they had back then was heavy, not like Ikea things today. At his age? With his demeanour? That amount of violence?” Hywel shakes his head. “Griff wouldn’t have been capable of it.” He shrugs. “And there are easier ways of ending your life.”
“Griff was riddled with arthritis. When you saw him in chapel, it was as much as he could do to turn the pages in the hymn book,” Denley Absalom, 69, tells me, from behind the open bonnet of a Peugeot. He runs the garage in Llangolman, like his father did before him. “Griff could just about drive a car or a tractor. To actually go and grab hold of things and lift them? No, no way.”
Griff and Patti were Denley’s cousins. “They were very quiet. Griff himself, very placid, afraid of his own shadow. Patti used to do a little bit of cooking. She used to collect things – needlework thimbles, or brooches.”
Molloy had considered whether relatives may have killed Griff and Patti in the hope of benefiting from their estates. “We traced 62 people who were related (in some cases only remotely) to the deceased. All male relatives between the ages of 15 and 50 were required to account for their movements during the material times.” He claimed that every house within a four- to five-mile radius of Ffynnon Samson was visited by police, and all males of the same age range interviewed. A blizzard of numbers in the report appears to back up the scale of this ambition: 1,260 people seen by the police, 572 men cleared by alibi, 156 statements taken.
“The police certainly didn’t interview me, or my uncle, who worked here as well, and was here every day,” Denley tells me. He remembers the incident room the police set up for a couple of months in the memorial hall at the top of the village. “To be quite honest with you, I think they were bored,” he tells me, with a sad grin. “They came down when father was here and bought a lot of ball bearings to play marbles with.”
Denley clearly wishes his parents were answering my questions. They died still troubled by the official version of events, he says. “If you knew Griff, it just feels totally wrong. The problem is, a lot of people of that generation have passed on, and there’s loads of new people moving into the area, who are not up with what happened.”
And there are questions that remain unanswered for Denley. What became of Griff and Patti’s dog, which disappeared around the time of the tragedy and was never mentioned in Molloy’s report? “It was a sheepdog, with eyes different colours, like David Bowie. He wasn’t quiet: if you turned up on their farmyard, he would yap and bark – they knew there was somebody about. If you drove past there, you’d see the dog.” He’s heard rumours that the dog was found in the farmyard well. And he’s heard things about footprints left in the snow that stretched from Ffynnon Samson across the valleys, that no one has ever explained. Again, he doesn’t know the details. “Still, it seems unusual that the dog just … disappeared.”
* * *
Everyone I speak to in Llangolman knows what was in Molloy’s report to the coroner. It jars with their memories of Griff and Patti, and their perception of the world as they knew it. In the pews of the 18th-century Baptist chapel at Rhydwilym, Denzil Davies, 67, tells me what it was like to work at Ffynnon Samson. “I went down there once a month to help Griff on the hay when I was about 15, 16. I was a keen haymaker, and it was such a different experience with Griff, because everything was at such a slow pace. He was a weakish person, I would say. Griff literally couldn’t lift a hay bale – he had to push it with his knee into place on to the trailer. He just couldn’t cope with it, really. After three layers of bales, he’d have to go in. That was laughable. You’d normally have 10.”
While Denzil says Griff was “very quiet”, he also describes him as “very sociable. In the shop, if I was being served before him, Griff would want to have a bit of a chat. He was always interested in what you were doing.” I ask if he thinks it’s fair to say that nobody really knew the Thomases. “Behind closed doors, nobody knows anybody,” he shrugs.
Eilir Davies, 81, grew up next door to Ffynnon Samson, and her family would sometimes be invited over for supper. “It would be bread and butter and a slice of ham – nothing elaborate. The front room was very spartan, really: hard chairs, no settees or anything like that.” Were they known to be wealthy people? “People knew they were well off,” she nods. “As a child, I remember, Patti didn’t stand any nonsense. You had to toe the line. She was bossy. She was the boss.” But the siblings seemed to get on with each other. “In the evenings, they used to sit in front of the fire with a newspaper, discussing whatever.”
Mon Davies knew Griff and Patti through chapel. (Mon, Eilir and Denzil share the same last name, but are not related.) “She used to help in the vestry with the teas and washing-up after communion. We had a big crowd back in those days. Patti used to sit by me and say, ‘Sut wyt ti?’, which is ‘How are you?’ in Welsh,” Mon remembers, nudging the space next to her on the pew. “She was sociable in chapel. Whenever I was here, she was here. I liked them as a pair.”
“I knew Patti and Griff very well,” Emyr Philips, 69, tells me. “I went to a chapel in the next valley across. Every year I arranged a trip from our chapel to all parts of the country – we went up to London for a day, and Liverpool. We went to Tenby every year in the summer. Griff always came.” Griff enjoyed himself, Emyr says, even though he didn’t say much and always sat near the back of the coach. Emyr knows how Patti is depicted in Molloy’s report. “Well, she wasn’t so domineering that she stopped him from going on the trips. She didn’t stop him from doing what he wanted to do,” he says.
It was Emyr’s job to collect the deposit for the coach trips. When he went to Ffynnon Samson, Griff retrieved the cash in full view of his young visitor; perhaps he was equally unguarded when others called at the house for money. “He took the deposit for the trip from a drawer in a glass cabinet. So there could have been money all over the place,” he tells me, his eyes wide. Just because more than £2,500 in cash was found in Ffynnon Samson, it doesn’t mean more money couldn’t have been stolen.
“At the time, I don’t think anybody really believed that Griff had done it,” Emyr says. “Especially in the circumstances in which he was found – it doesn’t make much sense at all.” Did people question the police’s decision? “Not enough,” he replies. “You should understand that you’re in an area where people tend to accept what the police says has happened. But we’re still questioning it. Even more these days, because we know that with DNA, there’s much more scope for finding out the truth. And what has kicked everybody on is the TV programme, The Pembrokeshire Murders.”
Emyr is talking about a 2021 ITV true crime miniseries on the crimes of John Cooper, a farm worker who was convicted after a 2011 cold case review of DNA evidence of two unsolved double murders. On 22 December 1985, Cooper murdered brother and sister Richard and Helen Thomas, both in their 50s, in their three-storey farmhouse at Scoveston Park near Milford Haven, 40 minutes’ drive from Llangolman. Detectives believe he targeted the property because he thought only Helen was home; when Richard discovered the burglary, Cooper shot them both, before setting fire to the house. Three and a half years later, he shot Pete and Gwenda Dixon after intercepting them on the Pembrokeshire coastal path near Little Haven and stealing their bank cards.
“My view is that there is some information that this same man was in this area, doing some fencing,” Emyr says.
“I heard that, too,” nods Eilir.
“Even with the big changes we’ve seen with people moving into the area, I think that people who were born here would like it to be solved,“ Emyr continues. “It matters because of the closeness of the Welsh-speaking community. We would like peace of mind that Griff was free from charge.”
“To think that Griff was called a lunatic and a murderer – it’s disgusting,” Mon says.
“The guilty person could be among us, couldn’t he? He could be walking around with us,” says Eilir. “As we’re getting older, we want possibly more answers.”
Emyr nods. “And we as a community are getting smaller. It will be too late soon.”
The miniseries on Cooper’s crimes may have sparked renewed interest in the Ffynnon Samson case, but the campaign to exonerate Griff exists because of Hefin Wyn, 72, editor of the Welsh-language monthly neighbourhood paper, Clebran. He organised the vigil last spring, and has been my guide on my visit to Pembrokeshire.
“We want to reopen the inquest and clear Griff’s name. That’s the main objective,” he tells me as he drives us through the winding roads out of Llangolman. “We have barristers on standby to fight the case if necessary.”
Hefin never knew the Thomases. He grew up on the other side of the Preseli mountains north of Llangolman, and was working as a journalist in Cardiff at the time of their deaths. “When I retired, I decided I didn’t want to play golf or bridge or whatever. I wanted to help out.” He moved back to the area, writing books on local history and running Clebran on a voluntary basis. Hefin has been following leads on Ffynnon Samson since 2006. “Clebran” means “chatter” in Welsh, and it is chatter – or rather gossip – that Hefin has to contend with as he tries to get to the truth of what may have happened.
Nothing supports the claim that Cooper could have been doing farm work in this part of Pembrokeshire in 1976. “It’s all right for everyone to say, ‘People say Cooper was around here.’ But who are those people?” he says, making broad arm gestures as he steers through the narrow lanes. “If somebody told me, ‘Yes, we remember him working on so and so’s farm,’ I’d go along and talk to the son of that farmer. That would be different.” The connection with Cooper seems at the moment to be nothing beyond similarities to the Scoveston murder. “But I’m open to being convinced otherwise,” he adds. (This view is backed up by senior police officers who investigated Cooper. Aldwyn Jones, retired deputy head of CID at Dyfed-Powys police at the time of Cooper’s arrest, tells me: “There is not a shred of evidence that linked Cooper to that area, or even a suggestion that he knew where Ffynnon Samson was.”)
For Hefin, the report to the coroner shows how Molloy – who was born in County Cork in Ireland, grew up in England, and spoke no Welsh – did not understand the way of life here. That’s how he could depict Griff and Patti as isolated recluses. “They were mainstays in the chapel. And in those days, social life turned around chapel activities. Molloy didn’t seem to appreciate that,” he pauses. “I’m surprised that somebody from his background ever became head of CID in Dyfed-Powys. In those days, it was a very Welsh-speaking area.”
Molloy arrived at Dyfed-Powys a hero in 1972. He’d just secured the conviction of Raymond Leslie Morris – who murdered three girls in Cannock Chase in the late 1960s – later writing a book about the case. It was the first of several high-profile successes for Molloy, whose record catching murderers and drug smugglers was so illustrious that the term “Molloy’s luck” was coined within the force. He retired in 1983, and died in 2003.
Confronted with a complex, baffling crime scene at Ffynnon Samson and not wanting to risk an unsolved case on his watch, could Molloy have picked the path of least resistance by blaming Griff? Hefin thinks so. “He wanted early closure, and he wanted a clean sheet. And since there were no close family – sons, daughters, etc – to question his decision, he got away with it.”
Hefin has his own theory. “I was thinking of a third person having gone there. He wanted to borrow money, possibly. He was local, using the many paths down there at the time. They knew each other. He had a cup of tea. He was desperate to have some money. Patti refused, things went haywire. That’s a very plausible explanation, I think.”
* * *
Eurfyl Evans was a junior detective in December 1976, promoted from the village bobby only the year before. “My boss at the time was Pat Molloy, who as far as I was concerned was one of the best detectives around,” he tells me over the phone from his home in west Wales. “I worked with him from then until he retired. I was part of his team on all the murders that he was on. I idolised the man.”
When it came to his version of events at Ffynnon Samson, Molloy often had to reassure the Welsh-speaking members of his team, Eurfyl tells me. “He justified it to us, a few times, over a pint. Quite a few of his detectives did say, ‘We’re having a lot of flak about this.’ He gave an answer, but it did create, and still does create a feeling of, was justice done?”
There are several elements of the case that still trouble Eurfyl. “One or two of the first persons who went there in the morning – not the postman – said they saw footprints in and around the house, in the ground frost. It was always rankling in my mind. If there was no third party, there wouldn’t have been any footprints. It wasn’t chased up with those witnesses – whether they are still alive, I don’t know.” Then there’s Griff’s head injury. “How would he sustain it? In all probability, he would not have an injury to his head inflicted by his sister. It’s hard to believe that point. So how did he get it? Pat Molloy’s reasoning – that after starting the fire he must have got excited by something and did something and injured his head – well, that’s vague. That’s so airy-fairy.”
But the young Eurfyl Evans was dazzled by this star detective, and his famous unblotted copybook. “He was so methodical, so good. I would have believed anything he said because he was a brilliant boss and an ace detective. The whole time he was in Dyfed-Powys, he did not have one undetected murder. So you could see why his team would be ever so loyal to his way of thinking.”
Does he think that this might be one occasion where Molloy could have got it wrong? Can he be truly confident in the conclusion Molloy reached at Ffynnon Samson? Eurfyl pauses. “I have to have an open mind. But in hindsight, after all these years, it’s got to be doubtful.”
For years, Dyfed-Powys refused to reopen the case, stating there was “no intention to reinvestigate any incidents on speculation alone”. But, on 18 October 2022, it announced Operation Hallam, a review of the exhibits they still hold from Ffynnon Samson. Items taken from the scene at the time include the bloodstained dining chair, the sewing machine and its cover, as well as samples of blood and hair from Griff and Patti. If the presence of a third party’s DNA is found on the suspected murder weapons, this could throw Molloy’s conclusions into doubt. But the police have not revealed which items remain in storage from the original investigation. In a statement, Det Supt Paul Jones said: “While the investigation at the time in 1976 was thorough, the forensic science was limited compared with today, and we will explore whether modern techniques can shed further light on the events at Ffynnon Samson in 1976.”
“It means that they’ve bowed to the pressure,” Hefin says. “I think it has a lot to do with the recent appointment of a new chief constable who happens to be from west Wales and Welsh-speaking, who understands the area.” It’s striking that the police made a point of describing the original investigation as “thorough”, I say. “They’ve always said that,” Hefin replies. Whenever anyone has questioned Molloy’s work, the force has been defensive, he says.
* * *
In a cafe on the outskirts of Haverfordwest, Hefin introduces me to Hayley Wood, a paralegal who read about the campaign two years ago in the Western Telegraph and is now working with him to get the inquest into Griff’s death reopened.
“The police told us that if it was investigated on today’s standards, it may have been a different outcome. I don’t think that the standards of the day were actually put in place,” Hayley says. Whatever Operation Hallam finds, Hefin and Hayley will seek to get the inquest reopened, but they have to wait for the police’s conclusions before they approach the coroner. So far, all three political representatives for the local area (Stephen Crabb MP and Cefin Campbell and Paul Davies, members of the Senedd) have backed calls to reopen the inquest.
Hayley’s analysis of Molloy’s report, the inquest report, newspaper cuttings and interviews with local people have convinced her that the original verdict is unsafe. There’s the lack of any mention of blood spatter of Patti on Griff (“he would have been covered in her blood”), the fact that their estates show Griff left more money than Patti and therefore would have no need to go begging to her, the disappearance of the sheepdog, the omission of Griff’s arthritis, and the apparent exaggeration of how many people were interviewed by police, among a host of other serious issues.
“The inquest took about six weeks – done and dusted. Griff and Patti weren’t represented legally, nor were the family. I’ve covered inquests that can take three or four years. It doesn’t sit right,” she says. “Within two or three days, before anything had come back from forensics, the press were being told it was a murder-suicide.” The leaks meant the public would be more willing to accept a conclusion that couldn’t be disproved because the key witnesses were dead, and also shut down discussion of other versions of events, and other evidence coming forward.
Hayley has written up her findings in a document that runs to more than 9,000 words. She’s freelance; none of this work has been paid. Even though Hayley has been living in the area for 35 years, she was born in Wolverhampton; the campaign to exonerate Griff is being driven by people who never knew him and weren’t living in the local community when he died. Why does this case matter so much to them both?
“I do it because I care about my community, and injustice. The police got it so wrong. How often have they got it wrong?” Hayley replies. “That community has never been allowed to grieve for their friends and their family. That sticks in my mind.”
Many convictions based on hunches and circumstantial evidence have been overturned in the light of modern forensic techniques. A string of high-profile murder convictions were quashed in the 1990s, once DNA evidence became available in appeals. In Wales, Lynette White’s killer remained at large for 15 years until he was caught through DNA evidence in 2003: three men had been wrongly convicted of her murder in Cardiff in 1988, and served two years in prison before they were cleared. The killer of Sandra Phillips, murdered in Swansea in 1985, is still unknown; two brothers spent six years in prison for her murder before their convictions were overturned.
But even cases that result in a miscarriage of justice involve a trial; no case for Griff’s defence was made in a criminal court, or to the coroner. Even if Operation Hallam finds that Molloy got it right, Griff never got a chance to defend himself. It is this sense of injustice that refuses to die among the community here.
“It’s not necessarily a matter of finding the culprit, it’s a matter of clearing Griff Thomas’s name, because he seemed to be a genuine person. Since the strength of local feeling is so strong as well, one must do one’s utmost to ensure justice,” Hefin tells me. “Once we succeed – and we will succeed – I think I will feel that I own a piece of the earth around here. The earth in Llangolman will sleep easier, or more quietly, because justice has been done.”
