The brutal murder of an elderly couple which went undiscovered for 14 years is being explored in a new TV documentary.
William and Patricia Wycherley were murdered by their daughter and her husband at their home in Mansfield in 1998.
They were not well-known and didn’t have many friends but neighbours described them as “old-fashioned” with William being “like a Victorian father, head of the family”.
Their daughter Susan met her husband Christopher Edwards through a dating agency and they married in 1983.
The couple had an obsession with collecting Hollywood memorabilia and spent £20,000 on a signed photograph of Frank Sinatra.
However, the “hobby” put them tens of thousands of pounds in debt.
It is unknown exactly why, but in May 1998, William and Patricia, aged 85 and 63 respectively, were each shot twice in the chest by the couple.
After their deaths, Christopher buried them in their back garden and planted shrubs over them to conceal his actions.
Susan then opened a joint bank account with her and her mother’s name and transferred her parent’s £40,000 savings into it.
The couple also redirected the Wycherley’s pensions and government payments to themselves.
Due to them not being social, the Wycherley’s neighbours assumed they had moved away and their daughter told people they were travelling.
Susan and Christopher even sent Christmas cards to relatives and took care of the house to maintain the lie. They sold the Wycherley’s home in 2005 for just £67,000, using forged signatures.
But the couple’s murder went undiscovered until 2012, when Susan and Christopher were living in Lille and Christopher gave his mother the story while asking for money after they ran out.
She told the police, who discovered the Wycherley’s bodies and Susan and Christopher surrendered to the police at St Pancras Station, in London. They were found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison.
The couple maintain that Patricia shot William and then provoked Susan into shooting her, claiming Patricia said that Susan was never wanted as a child and that she had been having an affair with her daughter’s husband.
The trial found this claim unlikely as ballistic evidence pointed to the shot being done carefully by someone with experience. Christopher had been a member of a gun club.
The case was made into a Sky docudrama series called Landscapers starring Olivia Coleman and David Thewlis as Susan and Christopher. The series suggests that Susan was abused by her parents as a child and bullied into adulthood.
And now it has been explored in a documentary for Channel 5 titled The Body Under The Patio: Murder in Suburbia. It is airing tonight at 10pm.
