By 
Olivia Colman and David Thewlis star in Sky Atlantic’s Landscapers as Susan and Christopher Edwards, a thoroughly unremarkable couple from Dagenham who were revealed to have been at the centre of one of the most ghoulish and shocking crimes in recent British history.
Susan Edwards had been a librarian in her twenties before stopping working; her husband Christopher was an accountant. They met through a dating agency, and had no children or other friends.
Susan’s parents were Patricia and William Wycherley. They kept themselves to themselves, neighbours said. They didn’t have any friends, and their extended family barely saw them. Their grass was always cut, the gutters always clear, the windows always clean.
It was perhaps understandable that few people saw the Wycherleys when they seemed to constantly be on holiday somewhere or other. Neighbours heard they were off to Morecambe, or Blackpool, or Ireland, or even to Australia.
“It is like he is having his second youth now because when he does speak now he speaks of travel – and travelling,” Susan wrote to a cousin in 2011. “I cannot really keep up with where he is planning to settle!”
It was a lie. Patricia and William had been shot dead at point blank range on the May bank holiday weekend of 1998. She was 63; he was 86. They were buried a metre under their own lawn, wrapped in a duvet cover.
On Tuesday morning, Susan transferred £40,000 out of her parents’ account and opened up a joint account in the name of herself and her mother. Into it the couple directed the Wycherleys’ pensions, fuel allowances, savings and disability payments.
The Edwards would travel from their home in West London to the Wycherleys’ home in the former mining village of Forest Town outside Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, every three weeks. They kept up the pretence of the Wycherleys’ presence in the house by mowing the lawn and keeping the house presentable.
“I should explain that - with my father getting elderly and my mother not always in the best of health – they had been travelling around Ireland because of the good air on and off for some years,” one Christmas card from 2007 read.
In total, the Edwards stole £285,286 from Susan’s parents over 14 years, even faking the Wycherleys’ signatures on forms to sell their house. The effort to which the Edwards went to maintain the Wycherleys’ lives was extensive: they sorted through all of the couple’s mail, replying to inquiries, putting off doctor’s appointments and invitations for vaccinations, and returning greetings cards.
Where did the money go? They didn’t have a car; one neighbour noted they didn’t even have a bike. Much of it was spent on trinkets and mementos from Hollywood stars. Gary Cooper was a particular favourite; Susan bought a signed photo, plus a bank form with his signature. The latter cost them £3000, and a typed two-line thank you letter to a fan another £2000.
The problem was that the Edwards were terrible with money. After splurging on memorabilia, they would attempt to sell it on – only to lose two thirds of what they’d paid for it. They got into debt, and had to sell the Wycherleys’ house.
In 2012 the Department for Work and Pensions’ centenarians department started asking for a face-to-face meeting with William as he approached his hundredth birthday. After getting away with it for so long, the road seemed to be running out. The Edwards fled to France, taking with them £10,000 stolen from Christopher’s work.
It wasn’t a brilliant plan. Neither could speak French so they couldn’t find work, and their money ran out after a few months. Then the police got a tip-off from an unlikely source.
“The original caller was Christopher Edwards's stepmother, who had spoken to him when he rang asking for money," local journalist Andy Done-Johnson, who broke the story and later wrote a book about it, told the BBC.
"Police left a message with her for him to ring them. And, oddly, he did.”
Christopher called the police and told them that the Wycherleys had died when an argument turned into a fight while Susan was in the house. A week later, he emailed to say that he and Susan would return to England.
After a year abroad, the Edwards returned to London on 30 October 2013. When they were arrested at St Pancras Eurostar terminal, they carried a single Euro between them, plus their clothes and a box full of memorabilia. They were £160,000 in debt. Police charged them with murder.
At Nottingham Crown Court, the Edwards denied murder but admitted manslaughter. Their story was that Patricia had shot William using a World War Two revolver after an argument. Then, they said, Patricia had taunted Susan, who had snapped and shot her mother.
It was only the next weekend, when he returned to the house, that Christopher got involved. Susan stated in court that she had told her husband that the Wycherleys were lying dead upstairs while she ate fish and chips and watched the Eurovision Song Contest.
The next day they buried the bodies.
Prosecutors disagreed. They said Susan shot her parents over a grudge she bore over an incident in which part of a £10,000 inheritance from her grandmother was invested in the Wycherleys’ home in London, which she hadn’t been repaid.
"For years and years, Christopher thought he was a pen friend of French actor Gérard Depardieu," Done-Johnson told the BBC.
"Christopher would write and Susan would take the letters, presumably throw them away, and write back as Gerard. She even bought a stamp to make her letters look like they had a French postmark.
"So blurry was the boundary between reality and fantasy that it was never clear why this happened or whether Christopher knew what was going on.”
The turning point of the trial was when Christopher, who was a member of a gun club, was asked to demonstrate how he would fire a pistol. Calmly and with control, he turned and ‘fired’ four shots over the heads of the jury.
The atmosphere turned distinctly chilly, according to those who were there. The Edwards were found guilty of murder, and sentenced to 25 years in prison each.
