We sued dad...he killed our Mum; siblings make legal history (Dunstable, England, United Kingdom)

Dad THOMAS BROWN was convicted in the 2002 murder of his wife, and will be eligible for parole in 2012. The two surviving children ended up a series of abusive children's homes and foster families. In a first for Great Britain, the children--now adults-- are suing their father for psychological damage and financial loss. They want to make sure that the father will be unable to claim "his" half of the value of the former marital home if released.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1280507/The-remarkable-story-siblings-making-legal-history-suing-father.html

We sued Dad... he killed our Mum: Told for the first time, the remarkable story of the siblings who are making legal history
By Antonia Hoyle and Punteha Yazdanian
Last updated at 10:56 PM on 22nd May 2010

There is a cherished childhood memory that Katherine and David Brown draw upon when grief threatens to engulf them. Their mother, Avril, had taken them on holiday to Cornwall. They rode bicycles to the coast where she bought them ice cream.

Katherine chose mint chocolate chip while her younger brother asked for vanilla. Avril smiled proudly as they ate their cones together.

A devoted parent, she ferried them to piano lessons and taught them to swim. She took them on camping trips and enrolled them in the Beavers. And, as a respected chemistry teacher, she instilled in them a love of learning.

But Avril’s greatest legacy to her children was her unflinching stoicism. It was an attribute that, in a tragic irony, Katherine and David would come to rely on as they journeyed into adulthood.

Their father, Thomas Brown, was a violent depressive who developed a deep and unfounded hatred of Avril and their two children. It built to such an extent that, when the siblings were 15 and 13 years old, he stabbed his wife to death.

Back in January 2002, the murder shocked their small town of Dunstable in Bedfordshire and the students of Queens’ School in Bushey, near Watford, where Avril was head of chemistry. With no living grandparents or extended family, Katherine and David were passed, unwanted, from foster family to children’s home.

Confronted with such tragedy, the pair could have been forgiven for resigning themselves to a life of depression and thwarted dreams.

Yet both defied expectations and cynicism from social services to attend university and forge successful careers. They are articulate and well-adjusted, and look to the future with hope, not despair.

But they are also filled with anger towards their father, who, although convicted of murder, will be eligible for parole in 2012. He was also granted co-ownership of the three-bedroom family home, despite Avril having been the sole breadwinner in the marriage.

The two children made an unprecedented decision to take legal action against Thomas. In a groundbreaking case - the first of its kind in Britain - they sued their father for psychological damage and financial loss.

The case is currently being settled out of court, with Brown’s lawyers suggesting they place the money he made from the sale of the house in 2004 into a trust that they will one day be able to access.

But Katherine and David insist that any monetary gains are secondary to obtaining
justice. ‘It was a point of principle,’ says Katherine. ‘We wanted to show we are willing to stand up to him. We’re not going to make money from this case. But we can at least stop our father from profiting.’

She adds: ‘David and I are headstrong and defiant in much the same way our mother was. Ultimately, it has helped us survive.

'Mum believed that staying with our father was the best thing she could do for us. She paid with her life and it would be doing her a disservice not to make the most of ours.

‘But we couldn’t have done this without each other. We have had nobody else to turn to. Everything we have been through has made us closer than ever.’

Certainly, the bond between them is unmistakable. Katherine, a 24-year-old care home manager, is the more assertive, and is protective of 21-year-old David, a software engineer. The siblings, who spoke exclusively to The Mail on Sunday, are understandably nervous about revealing their identities, which have hitherto been protected by law.

They will not reveal where they live and have asked that their faces not be shown in the pictures for which they have posed.

‘We’re scared of what will happen when our father is released,’ says David. ‘We have to contend with the fact he could end up living near us.’

As children, Avril did everything possible to counter the abuse they received from their father.

‘She would take us to classes and on Sundays we went to church,’ says Katherine.

‘We learnt how to kickbox and play the trumpet. On our birthdays she would buy us a huge cake – chocolate for me and jam sponge for David. She said we were the best things that had happened to her.’

Thomas, meanwhile, would tell his children that he wished they had never been born.

‘He said he hated the sight of us, that we were useless and ugly,’ says David.

With their different attitudes towards parenthood, it seems incomprehensible that Brown and Katherine found love. They met in London in the Seventies, when she was a university student and he was an electronics inspector.

She was a devout Christian and the only child of a military police officer. He was one of ten siblings, who claimed to have been expelled from school and beaten by his father before leaving his native Scotland at the age of 16.

Her parents and friends were aghast when they married in 1976. And as Thomas - who gave up his job after they married, claiming he wanted to care for the family - grew abusive, it seemed they had been right. But stubbornness prevented Avril from admitting it.

‘She believed marriage should be for life,’ says Katherine. ‘And as we were settled at school she thought it would be detrimental to uproot us. When we asked her why Dad was being mean she would try to justify his behaviour, saying he was under stress. We learned not to question it.’

Brown grew more reclusive and violent. He would lock himself in his bedroom, forcing Avril to sleep on the sofa. He drank at least three large bottles of whisky a week.

‘If we so much as said we had too much dressing on our salad, he would take us into the bathroom and wash our mouths out with soap,’ says David.

Katherine adds: ‘He tore up the few pictures of him with us because he didn’t want to acknowledge our existence. He also took down those of me that Mum had put up because we looked so similar and said I reminded him of her. He told us she made no effort with her appearance and did nothing around the house.’

The reality, of course, was very different. Smartly dressed and conscientious, Avril spent her days earning a living for the family and her evenings taking the children to classes and helping with their homework.

‘She was passionate about her work,’ says Katherine. ‘We both developed a love of science because of her.’

Yet she continued to tolerate her husband’s abuse, even when it became physical. ‘He would snap if he ran out of whisky, or the vacuum cleaner was in the wrong place,’ says Katherine.

‘He would smash the wooden statuettes and ornaments in the living room, and shake Mum in a rage. Once he broke her nose, although she didn’t even scream. If we tried to call the police he would rip the phone out of the socket. The three of us would lie in bed together, terrified of him. Yet Mum refused to press charges.’

As the years passed, Katherine and David tried to persuade Avril to leave, but it was a subject she refused to countenance. Her belief was, of course, misguided, culminating in the tragic events of January 11, 2002.

Both siblings came home from their Church of England school - a different one to that where their mother taught - to find their street swarming with police cars. An officer told the children there had been a murder.

They could only watch in horror as their father was arrested and brought out of the house in handcuffs.

It was two hours before they were told their mother, who was 51, was dead. ‘We felt confusion and shock, rather than grief,’ says David. 'It didn’t seem real. We spent the next three days being interviewed by police.’

Meanwhile Brown - who was, ironically, still his children’s legal guardian - disowned them. ‘I didn’t mind,’ says Katherine. ‘I had come to hate him anyway.’

Their classmates were informed of the tragedy at a school assembly. ‘It was all over the local papers and it felt like everyone was watching us,’ says David. ‘We learnt to put on a mask so people couldn’t tell how we were feeling.’

Their godmother - a friend of Avril’s - let them stay at her home in Dunstable. But after four months she let them go and cut off contact. ‘She had four children of her own and couldn’t cope,’ says Katherine.

They were sent to foster parents, but it was an unhappy arrangement. ‘They kept asking why Mum hadn’t left our father earlier, which of course, we were angry about anyway,’ says Katherine. ‘They said her belief in God was stupid, which was something else we were struggling to deal with.’

A few months after the murder, they were allowed to return to the family home to pick up their belongings. Overwhelmed by anger, David picked up a can of spray paint and scrawled the word ‘murderer’ on the wall. They then poured their father’s beloved cans of beer all over his clothes.

Ultimately, however, they kept their grief to themselves. Initially denied counselling lest
it affect their witness statements, they quickly became introspective.

‘The only time I would cry was at night, in bed,’ says David. ‘Mum had taught us to stay strong and carry on, and the only way we could cope was by blocking it out.’

At the two-week trial, in February 2003, they learned that Brown had stabbed Avril 47 times with a sharpened screwdriver. He had called the police and confessed, saying: ‘I am ready to go – take me away.’

The siblings have a theory that their mother may have finally plucked up the courage to tell Brown she was leaving him that day, thus provoking his rage.

He pleaded not guilty to murder, instead pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The court, however, convicted him of murder.

Brown, now 65, was given a life sentence - but with a tariff of only ten years.

'We were devastated,’ says David. ‘His crime was so brutal and we had never considered the possibility that we would see him alive again. We had hoped he would die in prison.’

Meanwhile, the siblings had inherited half the house and made the decision that they would sue their father for the other half.

‘It seemed so unfair that he would inherit it just because it was in his name,’ says Katherine.
She and David ran away from their foster family after 18 months, claiming they became drunk and abusive. Housed in a respite home and two subsequent children’s homes, they descended into depression.

‘David would shut himself in his room while I smuggled alcohol into mine to shut out the pain,’ says Katherine.

‘I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. We had nightmares and struggled to sleep or eat. I missed my mother’s advice and was tortured by what I could have done to save her life. What if I had come home earlier, or persuaded her to leave?’
She sought solace in her studies, gaining straight As in her GCSEs and taking four A-levels.

‘I realised I could carry on drinking and end up on benefits or go to university and make a success out of my life,’ she says. But she had no help from the staff at the children’s home.

‘Social workers assumed I was thick and said there was no point in applying,’ she says. ‘I was determined to prove them wrong.’

She succeeded, winning a place to study forensic science at one of the top institutions in the country, from which she would eventually earn a first class degree.

But it meant she and David - still in the care home and doing his A-levels - were separated for the first time. ‘I came back every weekend and considered quitting, but the thought of our mother’s ambition drove me on,’ she says.

David adopted the same stoic attitude as his sister. ‘I couldn’t consider suicide, because killing myself would be denying what our mother did for us and robbing my sister of support,’ he says.
They are now compiling impact statements in an attempt to stop their father from being released.

Added to the stress of suing him, it has left them exhausted. ‘It has been a relentless process. We have fought so hard and will be glad when it is all over,’ says Katherine.

David graduated last summer and the two bought a house together.

Both single, they say their bond makes relationships difficult. ‘People find it hard to understand what we have been through, or why we rely on each other,’ says Katherine.

But the pair will continue to do so, and look to the future with optimism.

‘As far as we’re concerned we don’t feel we have a father,’ she says. ‘We are determined to prove his negativity about us wrong. Our mother was so highly motivated and loving in the face of such adversity that we feel a duty to be the same.’

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