The FaceTime Killing: The brutal death of Christopher Martin

This week starts with the usual...tattoo double-bookings, a very inebriated weekend, Will doing himself a mischief in the pit at The Offspring, and a knife-wielding, mozzarella-eating stand-off with the ghost of Luther. Standard.

In the early hours of 28th May 2021, a young woman answered a FaceTime call from her partner, Jack Forde. What she saw on the screen was him attacking his own grandfather, 74-year-old Christopher Martin, in the New Cross home they shared.

This week Hannah tells Rach the story behind the headlines, a man who'd just lost his wife of 55 years, a grandson the system already knew was dangerous, and the safety net that was never more than one grieving widower. It's a story about supervision orders, disengagement from mental health services, and what happens when the only thing standing between danger and disaster is love.

Content warning: this episode discusses a violent killing, mental illness, addiction, bereavement and the Covid-19 pandemic.

If you or someone you know needs support, resources can be found below.

Mental health support & crisis
Samaritans – 116 123, free, 24/7. For anyone struggling to cope, not just suicidal crisis.

SANEline – 0300 304 7000, 4.30pm–10pm daily. Emotional support for anyone affected by mental health problems.

Shout – text 85258, free 24/7 confidential text support.

NHS 111 – select option 2 for 24/7 urgent mental health support.

Rethink Mental Illness – 0300 5000 927 (Mon–Fri, 9.30am–4pm). Support and advice for people living with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, and their carers.

Rethink Carers Hub – online advice for people caring for a loved one with mental illness, including what to do in a crisis. 

SAMM (Support after Murder and Manslaughter) – national charity offering peer support to people bereaved through homicide, including a confidential helpline (0121 472 2912) and non-religious retreats. All volunteers have been bereaved this way themselves.

Transcript

Ep 08 - Christopher Martin
Hello. Hi. I'm Rachel.
I'm Hannah. And this is the Sinister South podcast, a podcast all about the horrible wrongings
south of the river. Indeedy.
Indeedy. We're still lounging. We're lounging again.
I don't know if this is a testament to, well, no, who am I lying, who am I, like, what? What? You
alright mate? What? I don't know, I'm having some sort of aneurysm. I was gonna say, who am I
pretending to be? The reason, the reason we are still lounging, I was going to be like, oh, is it just
that like, oh, we could have been recording multiple in one. No, it's because I'm lazy.
And I still haven't put the bed away. Oh, yeah. It's not the same day.
No, no, no, no, no, no. We are definitely an entire week later. The bed is still out in the time shed
because it's been too hot to work in here.
So I just haven't, hadn't had the need to put it all away. But there we go. How are you? I'm alright.
Good. I'm a bit tired. Yeah.
But shouldn't complain. Well, you're allowed to. Yeah.
No, I'm okay. I've seen a lot of you. I know.
Absolutely. Fuck all to say to you. I know.
I know. We have. We massively overdid it.
I've seen you what? Thursday. Thursday. Briefly Friday.
Yeah. Lot of Saturday. Lot of Saturday.
And today. Yeah. It's too much.
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Yep. We have. I feel like we might have reached our quota for July even.
Not even there yet. Today is the first of July when this comes out. And I think we're actually, we're
actually over it now.
We're done. We're finished, I'm afraid. But yes, we have seen a lot of each other.
It's been lovely though. It has been. I'm only joking.I have very much enjoyed it. I am. I called you on Thursday.
I was having a day. On Thursday. Having a day.
I fucked someone up at work. Say that again. Because it did sound like you just said, I fucked
someone at work.
Oh dear. No, I didn't do that. I fucked something up at work.
Very stupid mistake. Very annoyed with myself. Did the whole self-flagellation thing.
Yeah. It's fine. Hey, look.
The shit happens. And as you've said multiple times, saving PDFs, not lives. No one died.
But yeah. And then I was meant to go and get my tattoo, which I've been waiting for for ages. And
there was an issue where it was double booked.
I was basically in Brighton when I got the phone call to say, I can't fit you in. So then came back
and decided, right, fuck, fuck this noise. I called Han and when I was the phone call was like, it
started fine.
I was like, you're right. She's like, yeah. Like, I know I never ring you, but, um, yeah, like, well, I'm
like, and I was like, oh no.
Oh, something big's going down. And then I couldn't really hear you. I was like, oh, hello, alcohol.
Yep. I don't actually really need much else. That was all the invitation that was needed.
Invitation. Apparently I'm trying to be a Geordie now. There we go.
Oh God. No, that was the only invitation needed. Yeah.
Yeah. And then I came round yours and we got suitably inebriated. Indeedy.
Ate some charcuterie. Indeedy do. And then I had to come home and deal with an absolute
meltdown.
But that was fine. He just doesn't know how to deal with the heat. He's got that Dave syndrome
from black books.
That's just, that's all it is. But yeah, so that was really nice. And then we went and got drunk with
our mate Claire.
Indeed. On Saturday, which was lovely. We'd say friend of the pub, but she's not.She's not. She's really not. If anything, she is the one that turns it off immediately.
Normally because it's like, it's coming through my child's Alexa. But yeah, Claire. Hi Claire.
And she, uh, yeah, we had a lovely time in her garden. Drinking keg spritz and ciders and all the
rest of it. It was lovely.
And it was when I turned around to you and went, I think we might need to get a cab, mate. And I
was like, honestly, because I've, I've met Rachel before. I was like, oh, get a cab already.
It's probably so early and Rachel has to go to bed. And I looked and I was like, oh, it's 1.45 AM.
No, that's fine.
I'll get a cab now. Yep. No, you're right.
You are right. If you hadn't said it then. We would have been sat there till five in the morning.
Yeah. If Will hadn't rung you. And none of us had looked at the time.
Nope. Just shooting the shit. That was fun.
It was really lovely. Nice day, night scenario. It was just amusing when I got the phone call from
Will being like, um, hello.
He'd been out as well. Um, hello. Where are you? Yeah.
I'm out. I've never known me get home before you. I heard him on the phone and he was like, I
went upstairs and checked the bed and you weren't asleep.
No, I'm being a dirty stopper. I'm having a wonderful time. I must hasten to add, because those
eagle-eared of you may have heard that yes, Will was out and so was I. The children were at my
mum's.
It's funny. It wasn't just kind of leaving them to fend for themselves. Mama needs a drink.
And then, yeah, that was lovely. It was a really nice time. What did you, you didn't do much
yesterday, did you? No, very little.
Very little yesterday. Fair. Fair.
I, as people may have seen, was inebriated again. I know. Look at you.
I know. Hair of the dog had to happen because I was not in a happy way when I woke up on
Sunday morning. What I loved was just the message I got from Claire going, I don't think I've ever
seen you drink that much.Or for that long. No, I know. But that is the thing.
We've always said it. Yeah, you're good at day drinking. Give me a drink during the day and I've
got the stamina.
I can't do it in a controlled, like, evening out. It has to be from like two in the afternoon onwards
and then I'm all good. But yeah, so I got hair of the dog and then Will and I got on a bus and went
to see the offspring.
Yes. At Crystal Palace Park, which was lovely. It was very funny.
I don't know if I've said this to you today, but it was very funny when we were on the bus going to
Crystal Palace. Both of us just sat in silence, staring immediately ahead of us, saying nothing to
each other at all. And then we just went, peace and quiet.
It's nice. I guess there's no kids and we're both disgustingly hung over. We are very intelligent
people who have made this very easy for ourselves.
But no, the offspring was good. Oh, the offspring was phenomenal. It was so good.
It was the right level of bouncy, happy fun. They played all the songs I wanted to hear apart from
Gone Away, which I knew they wouldn't play it. But there was this little, little part of me that just
hoped.
But alas. So to Dexter and Noodles, if you're listening, next time you play, please can you play
Gone Away? Thank you very much. But yeah, no, they played all of those when they did Pretty
Fly for a White Guy.
It was intense. I bet. It was amazing.
They had like four or five of those. You know, they have them at car dealerships. The big wavy
men.
Wavy men. They had those all looking like the guy from the video. They got like four or five
people from the crowd who'd been dressed like the guy from the video.
Oh, wow. Up on stage doing the dance where he does like the leg thing. And there were
fireworks.
And there was also, it was really good. It was a really, really good gig. And yeah, and I think just
because it's impossible to be miserable or aggressive or unhappy listening to pop punk.
Fair. So, you know, even the kids are all right. Like that song is dark.
Yeah. But it's got a lovely, lovely beat to it. It's very bouncy.We're going to bounce and we'll be fine. So yeah, I had a lot of fun doing that. I did have to tell
myself at one point, you have had two children.
Stop jumping. It's quite enough. It's quite enough of that.
Thank you. And then Will decided that he had just about gotten over his hangover enough to
finally get into the pit for like the last song. And he ran in and then immediately fell over.
Got up, carried on enjoying the pit and then came back and went, I was like, you're not going to
go back in for the encore? He was like, oh, I've done my knee. I've done something to my knee.
Done myself a mischief.
Done myself a mischief. So, yeah. So that was amusing.
But it was also very nice to see there were so many children there, but they were all the children
of the people my age. Yes. So all the people my age had gone to watch and the kids just come
along for the ride.
It was not that full of children and their parents were there chaperoning. It was the complete
opposite. Yeah.
And that made me very happy. So yeah, that was my weekend. I've had a, it's knackering though.
Can't get home at two o'clock in the morning on Saturday and then not until midnight on Sunday
and then be okay on Monday. No, no, no. It's been, it's been a bit much.
But there we go. Anyway. Shall we do some of the nice bits before we crack on? So yeah, as is
our want now, we are doing all the nice bits up front.
So you have to listen. Ha ha. We've got all the social medias.
We are on Instagram and TikTok under SinisterSouthPod. We, if you want to go and watch me
being a drunken lunatic in Crystal Palace Park, I think the stories are still up for 24 hours. If you
go to Rach.SinisterSouth or you can also go to Han.SinisterSouth. Those are our personal
accounts where you can get a bit more behind the scenes nonsense.
Hear me and my incredibly deep voice, which sounds even worse on a phone. Okay. Like, I hear
my voice.
We record this often enough, but to hear it played back to you when you filmed a video and you
don't realise that, like, oh, it can just hear you singing. And what, what is that? What are those
notes you're trying to hit? And did you forget the, did you forget the words there? Because that
definitely sounded like... If you want to go and see that, you can. I've also got the Facebook
group, which is run by the ever so lovely Lou.And that is called Trevor's Unite. We have a website, which is Sinister South Podcast. No.
No. Damn it. SinisterSouthPod.co.uk.com. Dot co dot UK.
What did you say? I said dot co dot UK. Okay. Sorry.
Yeah. So SinisterSouthPod.co.uk is the website. SinisterSouthPodcast.gmail.com is the email
address.
You can come and leave us a nice little message. Come say hi. And then we've got the Patreon.
And she got our shit together, guys. All of the pins are on the backing cards. They're all there.
I just need to get envelopes, which I'm going to do tomorrow. Because I'm going out into town
tomorrow. I will come back via a post office.
I will have bought envelopes. Okay. So the pins are coming.
Gosh, we're cooking with gas. I know. And I made a couple of designs for some T-shirts.
Yes. I think this was a me going to you drunkenly saying to you, I just wanted a T-shirt to be
blank. Instead of just saying a word, just saying things on it.
Yeah, that is exactly what happened. And like all good things, when we decide to do something,
when we're inebriated, we end up having made this fucking rod for our backs. So now I've made
some T-shirts.
And I'm going to keep saying it very quietly, because then I don't have to honour anything. You
don't have to sell them. I don't have to sell them.
No, but we have got some coming. And there's a couple of people, you know who you are, but we
will also let you know who you are, who may be getting a couple in the post to just to say thank
you for some things. So there we go.
Hannah's going to get in contact with you. She's looking at me as if to say, what the fuck are you
on about? No, I remember. I'll text my mum.
Yeah, there we go. So maybe, who knows? We'll see what happens there. But we've got the
creative juices flowing.
So yes, if you... There's that. I forgot my train of thought at the time. I think it was something
about stuff.
I think we've done it. Those are the nice bits. There we go.
Oh dear. Have you got a story for me? Yeah. Are you ready for it? I think so.Okay. Now, we'll get through it together. Okay.
There's some not nice bits, obviously. There's also not vast amounts, which I feel like we are just
parroting that at the moment. But there isn't vast amounts released about everybody involved.
So we've got what we've got. Yeah. And I've tried to not be boring as well in terms of
conversations that we've had quite prolifically recently.
So if it feels like I've not gone as deep into some of that as I could have, or have tried to come at
it at a different angle, that's why. Yeah, fair. Because otherwise I can't just have the same
conversation every week.
No, no, no. So, at about four in the morning on the 28th of May 2021, a young woman answered
a FaceTime call from her partner. What she saw on the screen was him attacking a man.
Oh God. That man was his own grandfather. Oh God.
So the partner that rang was 25-year-old Jack Ford. Grandfather was 74-year-old Christopher
Martin. And they were in the house that the two of them shared in New Cross.
By the time she answered, Christopher was probably already dead. She wasn't watching the
attack begin, but she was watching the end. And that call is how the case reached the news.
It became the FaceTime killing. It's a grim, modern detail, and probably the reason it got reported
on at all. But the call is just the hook, it's not the story.
The story is Christopher Martin, a man who'd just buried his wife of 55 years, who opened his
door to a grandson the state already knew was dangerous, and who he grew frightened of, so
much so that he used to sleep with a knife under his pillow. But he did keep that door open to his
grandson anyway. It's a story about a particular kind of failure, the kind this country keeps
repeating.
A person known to be a risk slips quietly out of the system, and the only safety net left is
someone who loves them. We're going to try and take all that apart slowly. Okay.
Like I said, one warning before we start, this is a violent killing. Okay. And we do talk about
mental illness, addiction, death of a spouse, the pandemic.
Okay. So if that's not your bag today, that's not a problem. Mm-hmm.
But we'll start with Chris. So Christopher Martin was 74. His family described a man who worked
hard his whole life for the people he loved, and would do anything for any of them.
Five months before he died, he'd lost his wife, and they'd been married for 55 years. It was a
marriage that had basically outlasted everything else in their worlds, apart from COVID. Oh, fuck.Her death came around the turn of the year, and it was the very worst kind of stretch in the
pandemic for the country as well. It was the second wave driven by the new variant, and it
peaked in that mid-January time period in 2021. Kind of more than 1,000 deaths a day.
Fuck. On the 26th of January, the UK passed 100,000 COVID deaths, half of them in the
previous three months. I did not know that.
That's insane. The whole country was locked down. So a man losing his wife for 55 years was
doing it inside of all of that.
The restrictions, the isolation, the limits on who could even attend a funeral, even if you could
have a funeral. Someone who he'd shared a home with for over half a century, it was suddenly
just alone in that home, without her, in a winter when the rest of the world was shut away too. So
that's this man this story finds, already grieving, already in a way on his own.
And there's painfully little else I can tell you about him. There's no real obituary. There's no real
tribute pages.
There's not really any photographs in the papers. There's no record of where he worked or where
he grew up. His wife of 55 years isn't named anywhere in the coverage.
And we don't even have her first name. So, you know, a man lives 74 years, builds a marriage
that lasts 55 of them. And what survives in public is a few minutes in a courtroom describing how
he died.
He was a person, fully, long before he became a victim. And the absence of his story is in itself its
own kind of quiet injustice. Kind of part of what we're doing here today is trying to refuse to let the
way he died be the only thing left of him.
But I don't have too much more to tell you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair. So now for the grandson.
So what I did find funny, it was in a lot of the really early reports that kind of come out as the
case, like the data kind of as the case happened, his name got changed all over the place. So in
some reports, he's James Ford. In some, he's Jack.
I think his name is Jack Ford. That's how I understand it. It's kind of like, it might have been that
other people called him James for some reason.
Right. It's not one of those, it's not like James. James and Jack aren't the same name, are they?
But we're going to go with Jack because that's what I understand him to be called.
So Jack Ford was 25 years old in 2021, but his story doesn't begin there. It begins kind of almost
way before he was born. Spoiler alert.At his sentencing, his barrister, Casey John Ryder, described a childhood that is hard to listen to.
Ford was, in Ryder's phrase, quote, born an addict because his mother used drugs while she was
pregnant with him. He came into the world already dependent, already in withdrawal, and with no
say in any of it.
And the harm didn't stop there. Ryder told the court Ford was violently abused throughout his
childhood. So that phrase, born an addict, is easy to hear as a verdict on a person, but the
science is more careful than that.
So a bit of a side quest. Born an addict, and what does that actually mean? So when a baby is
exposed to drugs in the womb, they can be born in withdrawal. Doctors call it neonatal absence
syndrome.
And the newborn goes through the same kind of withdrawal an adult would. So there's tremors,
the high-pitched kind of crying, everything is much more high-pitched and escalated. That's not
the word I'm looking for, but you know what I mean? They have a lot of trouble feeding, a lot of
trouble sleeping, a lot of them have quite complex seizure, either multiple seizures or seizures
that are prolific throughout their young lives as well.
And that's kind of what was happening to Jack. What it does long-term is harder, and the honest
answer is very tangled. Research does link prenatal drug exposure to many later problems, with
attention, with impulse control, with what psychologists call externalising behaviour, which
includes aggression.
There's evidence that young adults exposed to drugs before birth are somewhat more likely to
end up arrested, and that the effect falls harder on boys. So you can see why a defence barrister
would raise it. But researchers do stress over and over again that you can't kind of cleanly
separate the drug exposure from everything else that tends to come hand in hand with it.
A baby-born dependent is very often born into poverty, into a home with at least one parent in the
grip of addiction, sometimes into violence and chaos, and all of that also shapes what's
happening in a developing brain too. So the outcomes get dramatically better when a child lands
somewhere stable, a calm home, support, consistent care, and it's also kind of the exposure that
loads the dice as well. And what maps onto this case almost exactly is that.
Jack Ford started life with the dice loaded, before he'd taken a breath. And then the second half
happened too, the violence, the chaos, the no stable place to land. The calm and the support that
pulls a child back from the edge was the thing he never got.
And it's not an excuse for what he did, but it's the start of a pattern that runs throughout his whole
life. The help that might have changed things arriving too late or not at all. So by the time he was
an adult, Ford drank heavily and was known to use drugs.He'd had episodes the court described as being disconnected from reality. Times he'd believed
he was someone else entirely, that he was his sister. And that belief kind of, it does come back in
a quite frightening way on the night Chris died.
But this case is more than a private family tragedy and the reason starts kind of nine months
before the killing. Jack Ford had already nearly killed two strangers. It's September 2020 and a
man in Peckham wakes up at around half past five in the morning to find a stranger inside his
home.
Ford is sitting across from him in the dark, talking, none of it making sense. Oh, fuck. That's for a
bag of chips.
My God, how terrifying. Then Ford takes a knife from the man's own kitchen and chases him. Oh,
fuck.
The man is stabbed several times. Afterwards, Jack leaves and he gets on a bus and he sits
behind a man and stabs him in the neck and the head. Fuck.
That was a 79-year-old man. The injuries are bad enough that the man needs around 40 stitches,
but they don't die. Thank God for that.
So two strangers in a single morning, a man asleep in his own home and an elderly man on a
bus. They had no connection to Ford and there was no motive that anyone could name. Oh, that
is terrifying.
Those two attacks were kind of barely reported on at the time. I went looking for the original
coverage and there's kind of almost nothing. The case seems to have passed through the courts
quietly and only surfaced publicly later at his sentencing for killing Chris.
So two people stabbed by a stranger and it really didn't even make the news. It's part of the
pattern. He is a man who keeps slipping through unseen until it is too late.
What the court did do with those two attacks kind of also shapes what comes, obviously. It found
him not guilty by reason of insanity and that finding is easy to get wrong. So let me be precise.
It did not mean he walked free, but it also wasn't a conviction with a prison sentence. So as we've
discussed quite a lot recently, he was not sent to prison for stabbing those two men, but he was
placed under a supervision order for two years. And he was released in March of 2021 to live in
the community under conditions.
I'm sorry, two years? Doesn't even do two years. For going into someone you don't know's house,
reenacting scenes from a horror movie and then stabbing an old person on the bus in the head.
Good.That makes sense. I'm going to get angry, aren't I? It's just me. So yeah, he's released back into
the community under conditions and the man who took him in, who opened his door to someone
just released after two stranger stabbings, was his grandfather, Chris.
Five months a widower at this point, alone in his house saying, yeah, come in. And I think we all
know by now that that phrase, supervision order, sounds far sturdier than it usually is. It isn't
prison, it isn't locked in a hospital ward.
It's a framework. You live in the community under conditions with treatment and oversight
attached. One of Ford's conditions was that he keep taking the medication he'd been prescribed.
And on paper, that makes complete sense, right? You keep someone supported in their own
community instead of locked away. In practise, it rests on a chain of ifs. The person has to
engage with it, has to take their medication, stay off drink and drugs, and the services around
them have to notice fast when any of that starts to slip.
So we've talked about insanity verdicts and how the law handles them, so I'm not going to go the
long way around again. But a supervision order is only ever as strong as everything propping it
up. And we're going to come back to what happens when the propping up fails to another case
where it failed catastrophically and where, unlike here, someone actually investigated why.
So what was propping up Ford's supervision order, in the end, wasn't a hospital or a ward or
really a team of professionals. It was a grieving 74-year-old man in a house in New Cross. Chris
and his grandson were close.
After Ford came out of the initial supervision order, Chris had given him lots of attention, he'd
given him money, he'd brought him a phone, he'd driven him around, kind of anything that Jack
needed, Chris was on hand to provide. And that's how Ford's girlfriend, who got the FaceTime
call, I don't have a name for her, but that's how she described it, as a grandfather doing
everything he could for a grandson who had nothing and nobody else. And it's not hard to see
how a man ends up here, recently widowed, rattling around a house that had held a marriage of
55 years, in the loneliest winter in living memory.
And here is someone who needs him, someone to look after, a reason to drive somewhere, to
buy something, to not be alone. As the formal support thinned out, Chris became the entirety of
Jack's support system, the whole safety net, made of one elderly man, held together with love
and duty, and it turns out, fear. Because Chris knew something was wrong.
The court heard, he'd started locking his bedroom door at night, sleeping with a knife under his
pillow, to protect himself from his own grandson. A grieving man in his 70s, takes in the grandson
no one else will, then locks himself in his bedroom every night, and lies awake with a knife within
reach, afraid the person on the other side of the door, and keeps him in the house regardless.
Doesn't kick him out.That's the contradiction the whole story turns on. He knew enough to be frightened, and he loved
enough to keep the door open to him. It's not a stupid thing to do, it's what a lot of people would
do, it's one of the most human things there is, it just didn't hold.
The safety net was already failing, in exactly the ways a supervision order can. Ford had stopped
taking his medication, and his barrister said, had fallen back into drinking drugs hard. The one
condition meant to keep everyone safe, had quietly lapsed, and nobody caught it.
And the trigger, if we can call it that, when it came, was almost nothing at all. In the days before
the killing, Chris had helped Ford's partner, who was pregnant, move out, into a new place. Right.
A kind thing, an ordinary decent thing, right? But it upset Ford. That is the closest the court could
get to a reason. Okay.
That's it. I don't have really kind of anything, much else to say about it. I don't know, like my,
completely my opinion, my conjecture is, that they potentially were both, drink and drug addicts,
that were living with Chris, she's fallen pregnant, and as I can see it, and it comes in a minute,
she does have family support.
She definitely has her mum around her. So I think, it sounds to me like, Chris helped the pregnant
partner move in, move back in with her mum. Right, okay.
Away from, not necessarily away from Jack, but be a pregnant woman with your mum, over
there, not in this house with this drug addict, who is mentally unwell. So around four in the
morning, on the 28th of May, Ford picks up his grandfather's phone, and FaceTimes that partner.
On the call, he was hitting himself, and saying a name, Anushka, get out, get out.
Anushka. In that moment, he believed he was his sister. On the phone, on the FaceTime even, I
should say, he then, he's looking at her, he's saying Anushka, he's saying like, I am Anushka, get
out, get out.
And then he flips the camera, and he opens the cupboard door, into a wardrobe. And Chris is
inside. Through the screen, his partner then watches him stamp on Chris, and pour boiling water
all over him, saying burn in hell.
Oh no. Kind of the saving grace by this point, is that it is thought Chris was probably already
dead. Right.
But she, you know, she wasn't watching something she could stop, like, either way, whether he
was alive or dead, like she was watching, an absolute kind of explosion of rage. And it, from
everything I've read, it kind of completely shocked her. Like, she knew he was violent, but it
wasn't like, she didn't ever expect it to turn on Chris like this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So she kind of, in her own way, she then became trapped. Ford had toldher that if she, if she hung up the phone, then, or if she did anything, he would go to her mother's
house, and kill her mum.
Right. So she's kind of on the video call, talking to him. The details of this are all pretty, like, I'm
sorry if this doesn't sound like my best work, but, so she's on the phone to him.
Right. What she believes is she's either witnessing, she doesn't know Chris, whether Chris is
alive or dead or not. Right, okay, fine.
But she kind of is paralysed. She doesn't want to do anything. She can't, like, she doesn't have
another phone.
Yeah. To, like, quietly call 999 or anything. She's just terrified.
And it's actually the fact, like, so she stays on the call with him, and he's, this is where it gets a bit
complicated, hang on, I might have to do this again, because I got really confused, and I've not
written it very well. But, so she's trapped, basically, right? Ford has told her that if she hangs up,
he's going to go to her mother's house, which I think is where she is as well. Right, okay.
And that he's going to kill her mum. Okay. So she stays on the call.
She's terrified. She doesn't actually know what she's witnessing, whether it's, like, whether Chris
is alive or dead. Right, okay.
She knows that she's watching someone being brutally attacked. Yeah. And hurt.
And the noise is such that, in the end, it's actually the girl's mum, who I believe heard stuff
through the wall in the house. She ends up ringing 999. Right.
But, there is also another school of thought here. Okay, okay. That she ends up, that they're not
together, that somehow, just kind of, almost coincidentally, Jack is outside the mum's house, and
the mum rings 999 because she sees him through the window and he looks insane.
Like, he looks deranged, and obviously, like, covered in blood and stuff. So she rings 999 there. I
can't verify either.
Right, okay. One of those two things seems to have happened. Right.
It's definitely the mum that makes the phone call. That makes the 999 call. So that's, you know,
the police did rush and get there very, very, very quickly.
Okay. He's arrested, and Chris is found. He obviously had critical, fatal injuries, and his body was
still in the wardrobe.
The post-mortem gave the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head, chest, andabdomen. He had been stabbed. He had been scolded.
He was 74 and pretty frail, so he didn't stand a chance. Oh, God. It took nearly two years to come
to court.
In April of 2023 at the Old Bailey, Ford pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter by
diminished responsibility. He didn't deny killing his grandfather, only that his mind was disordered
enough that in law it wasn't murder. Okay.
The prosecution accepted the plea. The judge called the case extremely sad, ordered a
psychiatric report, and adjourned. Okay.
In July of 2023, Ford was sentenced to life with a minimum term of ten years and five months.
The judge, Anthony Leonard, called the injuries quote, truly horrific. It was Ford's own barrister
who gave the case its most haunting line.
John Ryder told the court it was quote, extremely regrettable that Ford hadn't had the support that
should have been there after his initial release. The support that might have kept him on his
medication and kept everyone safe. And then he said that perhaps ironically, Ford had killed the
person that he had loved the most.
Yeah. And owed and owed the most as well. And the two people who had loved him the best, the
grandmother included in this, like one had already gone and the other was now dead by his hand.
Like, apparently, yeah, Jack was absolutely devastated by the loss of both the grandparents. Oh,
God. Chris's family wept in court as the details were read out.
Their statement was plain. Chris had worked hard his whole life for his family. This was
disgusting, cowardly attack on a frail and vulnerable old man.
And they were devastated all the more knowing it was done by one of their own. No amount of
time, they said, would heal their wounds or their quote, torturous imaginations. The picture of how
someone you love spent their last minutes.
That's the part a sentence doesn't touch. It's the not knowing, the question sitting underneath all
of why. And that question, why, is where this case kind of opens into something much bigger than
one house in New Cross.
There's a narrower version of it where we can actually chase. Did any, did anyone official ever
look into what went wrong? Yeah. So we've done a lot about probation services, letting people
slip through the net.
We've done a lot about kind of hospital orders going wrong or being released too early and
supervision not being in place. But I kind of wanted to look at this from the other angle. Soconvictions happened.
Then what? Yeah. Yeah. So when a case like this sits where it does across mental health
services, criminal justice, family safety, community supervision, there's normally four more
reviews after a crisis or something, a tragedy.
There's normally an independent investigation meant to work out what was missed and stop it
happening again. And I looked hard for one in Chris's case. I couldn't find it.
That doesn't prove there wasn't one or that nothing was examined privately, but there's nothing in
the public record. And without it, the lessons of how Chris died simply evaporate. It does seem
weird.
I mean, I'm going to ask this to you as if you are the fountain of all knowledge on this particular
topic, but why are some cases given serious case reviews? This is basically the question I'm
asking. Okay, sorry. No, don't apologise.
I like that your brain went to the same place mine did. So if we can't see inside this case, we can
look at one quite like it. Okay.
One that was investigated in enormous and painful detail. What that investigation found tells you
with real authority and what very probably went wrong in this case. Okay.
Fine. Okay. So, bit of a side quest.
The case they did investigate in Nottingham. Okay. This is heavy.
Alright. On the 13th of June, 2023, the same year Ford was sentenced, a man called Valdo
Calocane killed three people in Nottingham. He stabbed two 19-year-olds, Barnaby Webber and
Grace O'Malley.
Grace O'Malley-Kumar and a 65-year-old school caretaker, Ian Coates, and then drove a van into
more people. He attacked them around four in the morning. He had paranoid schizophrenia.
And like Ford, he denied murder and admitted man's daughter by diminished responsibility and
the prosecution accepted it. Hmm. I remember this case.
Valdo had been under the care of an NHS mental health trust for about two years. In that time, he
was sectioned, detained under the Mental Health Act, four separate times. Four, wow.
A consultant psychiatrist had warned, in as many words, that he could end up killing someone if
his illness wasn't managed. His family contacted services again and again, raising the alarm. And
the reoccurring problem, the thing at the centre of it, was that he kept disengaging.
He kept missing appointments, not taking his medication and dropping out of all contact. InSeptember of 2022, his mental health team discharged him. The reason was that they couldn't
get hold of him.
His care coordinator went to his address, made phone calls, sent a letter and got nowhere. One
staff member later put it to the public enquiry in a single sentence. Quote, we couldn't find him to
treat him or engage him.
So they discharged him back to his GP. The letter they sent the GP was later called wholly
inadequate, missing his risk assessment, missing his care plan, they didn't tell the police. And
then there was no further contact with health services at all until the morning he killed three
people.
Oh my God, I didn't know that. When investigators finally pulled it apart, a Care Quality
Commission review, then a full independent NHS investigation was done and they found that this
wasn't a one-off mistake by one bad team. The independent investigation found that discharging
patients simply because they disengaged had become, in one word, normalised.
It was routine. An overstretched service, too little oversight, and so the hardest to reach patients,
the very ones most at risk, you could argue, were the ones quietly dropping out of the system.
The regulator said it was clear, beyond any real doubt, that Valdo would relapse.
They discharged him anyway. This isn't a rare or freak pattern. There's a body called the National
Confidential Enquiry that states every mental health-related homicide in the country.
And the data is stark. Roughly a third of people with schizophrenia who go on to kill had stopped
taking their medication in the months before. Around four in ten had missed their final
appointment with mental health services before the killing.
That's about seven people a year, every year. And the figure hasn't fallen since around 2008.
Disengagement isn't a sign the risk has gone away.
No, if anything, it's a sign that you need to... Over and over, it's the last thing that happens before
disaster. And the system keeps reading it as a reason to close the files. It's just... I'm sorry, I don't
mean to interrupt.
It's just fucking mental. Like, how many of these cases have we covered where exactly what
you've just described has happened? Like, every single fucking one. Why has no one looked at
them and gone, hmm, fuck off.
So I can't tell you for certain that this is exactly what happened to Jack Ford because nobody
published a review that would prove it. But what we know follows the same shape. A man under
supervision required to take medication.
He stops. He falls back into drinking drugs. He drops out of whatever oversight he had.And the next time the system really sees him, his grandfather is dead. That's the pattern. Almost
line for line, right? The difference is that after Nottingham, three grieving families forced the
country to look.
That is the difference. After Newcross, as far as the public record shows, nobody did. Chris got
the same failure and not even the dignity of an enquiry.
So when Chris's family say they never got an answer to why, this is part of the answer they were
owed, right? And they didn't get. Yeah. It's not a satisfying one, but a real one.
He died in a gap the country already knew was there. He has been told about again and again
and keeps not being closed. So there's one more thread to pull on, kind of on its own from the
overarching story.
And that's the one thread that kind of put this case actually in the headlines to begin with. Yeah.
It's kind of, I believe, really the only reason we know about this.
So what does it do to a person to watch something like this through a screen? Yeah. We tend to
talk about violence on a screen as though the screen keeps us at a safe distance, holds us at
arm's length. And it doesn't always.
Sometimes it does the complete opposite. It drops you straight into the room and leaves you
completely powerless. Ford's partner wasn't simply watching a video that night.
She was made present at a killing, live, while pregnant, while being told that if she hung up then
he'd go to her mother's house and her mother would be next. The phone didn't shield her from
any of it. It delivered all of it to her and it trapped her there.
I think if I really, really fucking pushed I probably could have got her name. Right. But I don't play
that game.
No. We don't play that. She belongs in the count of people that, in this case, that are victims.
100% she does. She's a victim who will probably never appear in a headline or on a charge
sheet, who watch something nobody should ever see and then has had to carry it. Yeah, fuck
that.
Whatever the law makes of a witness on the end of a video call, what was done to her that night
was its own kind of harm. It's a strange new cruelty of the world we've built that a person can be
made to watch the worst moment of someone else's life from a mile away in the palm of their
hand and then be able to do nothing about it but keep looking. Yeah.
So, after all of it, the screen, the verdict, the enquiry that happened somewhere else, the data,
the failures, what stays isn't Jack Ford, hopefully, it's Chris. A man married 55 years who lost hiswife to Covid in the cruellest winter of the whole pandemic and found himself alone in their house.
Who, five months into that grief, opened his door to the grandson nobody else would take, who
gave him money and a phone and lifts and whatever else he needed because somebody needed
him and that mattered and who then lay awake behind a locked door with a knife under his pillow
afraid and he still wouldn't kick him out.
Ford came into this story as a child with the dice already loaded who never got the steadying
hand the research says can pull a life back from the edge. There's a terrible symmetry in it. The
help that might have saved Jack Ford never came and the help that might have saved
Christopher Martin, supervision that meant something, a team that noticed when a dangerous
man stopped taking his medication, that never came either.
Two people failed by the same absence at opposite ends of one life and in the gap where all that
help should have been there was only an old man grieving his wife keeping the door open out of
love and like I say his family never got their answer and there really isn't a clean one for me to
give you either. There's just that contradiction, the one I keep coming back to. Chris knew enough
to be frightened and he loved enough to keep the door open.
The danger was visible to nearly everyone around them. The two stabbings, the verdict, the
order, the abandoned medication, the locked bedroom door and a system and a family both held
their breath and hoped it would hold. It didn't.
A kind, hardworking, grieving man died in the home he'd opened up out of nothing but love. He
deserved a longer story than the one the record left him and we hope that this goes some way
towards that. Here.
Here. Wow. Well bloody done.
It's a messy one. I don't think it's my... I think you can tell I'm not a journalist and I haven't said
that for like four episodes so there we go. Mate, I think that like we've said it multiple times like
there are doing... picking the niche that we've picked for this podcast will always mean that there
are a lot of details that we can't tell people because, you know, one of the things I've realised is
that, you know, in America they have much, much softer reporting restrictions.
Yeah, yeah. You can get, you know, the freedom of information and all the rest of it. You can get
anything you want on anyone really, seemingly fairly easily.
We don't have that here and in a way I'm quite glad because also there's a lot of stuff that isn't our
business but I think that you've done the best with what you had and thank you. It's just another
devastatingly sad case. Again, there's so many questions that again I know that we probably
don't know the answers to but like the things that have come up for me as you were saying it it's
like so one is sort of like, yeah, what does it take for there to be a public enquiry into the state of
mental health? And like, I purposely didn't say that Jack was schizophrenic because I don't knowthat for a fact.
Yeah, fine. But we do know that he had delusions of having some reported it as like an entity in
him. Right.
Some said it was his sister. Right. This Anushka character is, I don't know, I actually don't know if
Anushka's real.
Right, okay. Yeah. There's definitely delusion there.
I don't, I can't, I purposely didn't say. Yeah, because we, it's, I mean, we can probably assume if
we were to self, if we were to diagnose armchair diagnosis, I think it definitely sounds like there is
something there of a paranoid schizophrenic. You don't break into someone's house, sit on the
end of their bed in the middle of the night.
Right. So this is the next bit. Right.
And I know I raised it at the time, but I'm going to go back to your point around the screens and
around the screen being something that protects you. And I said it was really interesting when
you were talking about that because we, I say it because you don't watch them, but I say it a lot
on this podcast that, oh, it's like something out of a horror movie. So something out of a horror
movie.
And there is something about it that kind of, to me, the idea of the screen does take away an
element of realism because it is, well, I've seen all this stuff on movies. It's in a, it's a movie, it's a
movie. And then when you hear it playing out in real life, it is beyond terrifying.
The idea that someone you don't know and has absolutely zero connection to you is in your
house in the middle of the night, sitting across from you, talking something you don't understand
and then chases you around your house with a knife and stabs you. That is, well, I don't, what?
No. I mean, the PTSD, how do you fucking recover from that? Well, exactly.
Where is the, what's the motive? What, apart from the fact that they are just a very unwell
individual, like, but you don't even know them. You haven't put yourself in harm's way. Like, what
the fuck? And then, yeah, the idea of that poor woman, his partner, having to watch what she was
watching.
And again, I feel a bit guilty. Like, that is an assumption I've made that she was in, into drinking
drugs and stuff too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I, yeah, I don't know that for a fact. That is an assumption I've made. I think that it, I mean, if
anyone knows any different, well, we'd be happy to hear it.
Do you know what? That's kind of, a lot of the time with these cases, I feel very self, I feel veryconfident in what we talk about because I know that both of us go as far as we can, get the facts
straight and we don't, we don't flower it up we don't put anything else in the, and if we do, it is
always like, I guess, I think. This is my opinion. And I'm very, I just feel very aware.
There feels, just say what you mean, Han. There feels like something sinister over this one that, I
don't, no, I don't know what I'm trying to say. Basically, I just feel like there's so much unknown
and unsaid that I wonder if it's going to be one of these things that's like, for a reason.
So there are huge, I don't think I can get a gagging order, but like, there are huge restrictions on
reporting. Like why, it's like everything goes so far and stops. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, what is, what is the reason for it? And it's not like there aren't cases that are absolutely
fucking horrific that aren't out there in the public domain and we've covered over a hundred of
them. Like, and another New Cross one that brings to mind is, you know, the French students.
Like that's fucking diabolical, but there's so much reporting.
So much. And I wonder if it is, could it be to do with the fact that there was mental illness
involved? Could it be to do with the fact that he'd been- I think because it's all one family. Like,
they all just closed ranks as hard as they can, which I have to respect.
Of course, of course. I'm not out here being like, so shout outs. Feel free to email me.
Like, I will be terrified. If you email me, I will cry. Unless it's like to be like, no, it's okay.
Like, fuck. Yeah, it is, it's really hard. And I think, yeah, I do wonder if there is something about it
being potentially mental health, potentially, mental health related and whether there is something
around sort of like duty of care for Jack, whether there's something around, as you said, the fact
that it's one family, maybe there's a duty of care to them.
Whatever it is, it's just, we're telling the story because we think it's important. Like, it's not, we're
not saying, we're not telling the story just to kind of be gratuitous about it. But, and even with the
conjecture, I think that like, it's a fair, I don't think it's a leap to assume about the partner just
because if, I don't know.
Why would she live with him? it feels, it feels like if there's not some sort of, yeah, I can see
where you got that assumption from. But the other thing I was going to say was like, with
witnessing something like that, it's almost like, I replay, I'm going back to my horror story thing. I
replay scenes from horror films constantly in my head.
I can pull out things that frighten the living bejesus out of me as a bit of a coping mechanism?
Maybe? Like, it's almost like, if I'm scared, oh well, nothing can be as scary as that. Can you
imagine that happening? Wow, we have such different brains. But, if I replay things like that, the
one that lives rent free and I have mentioned it too.No, you've seen it, you've seen it, you've seen it. I've mentioned it on the podcast before. It's the
scene in Luther.
Oh God. Oh God. Yeah.
Oh, that's horrible. We don't like it. It lives rent free in my head.
I can see it. Have we ever spoken about how I watch that? I don't know, we might, I don't know. I
think it might have been a Patreon thing ages ago.
Oh, fair. But, so the scene that Rachel's talking about is, there's a woman, I think she comes
home and she's getting ready for bed or whatever. Yeah, she comes home from work and she's
like, da da da, that's her usual routine.
She's closing doors, opening windows, turning the light on and off, blah, blah, blah, getting
undressed and she sits on her bed with her feet down and these, no, no, no, so it's not that, she
sits, she's there, she sits down and you see a shot of her feet. Yeah. Then she moves her feet up
onto the bed and it's like 30 seconds of her asleep with the light off, her in bed and then, that's it.
Oh God. Yeah, see look, my brain had even tried to sanitise it a bit further. Sorry, I have a divan
bed, no one's getting underneath that.
Can't get off of this futon now though. It's so close to the ground. Yeah, we're fine.
My dress can be skinny. Piece of paper skinny. But I watched that, it was broad daylight.
Yeah. I was alone at my mum's house, which is kind of unheard of, but I think everyone was on
holiday. Fine.
And I don't even think my brother and sister, like no one was there. Right. It was just me and Ted.
Okay. And, I watched it, was like, what the fuck? Like, got so scared that I then didn't know what
to do, so I just got a knife. Excellent.
And I was just holding a knife while I watched the rest. And then as I kind of must have just like
relaxed into it, I think I messaged you at one point, I was like, I just had a ball of mozzarella in
one hand that I was using my knife protection, my protection knife to cut bits of mozzarella off of
this ball of mozzarella and eat that with my protection knife. I couldn't let the knife go.
I just was like, I've got some mozzarella now too. Oh, Lord. Yeah.
Yeah. I remember you telling me that. It was a terrifying, terrifying scene.
The bloke comes out from under the bed if you haven't figured it out. And he's fucking terrified.
Anyway, I just remember me and Ted slides out really fast.And then you kind of like, but it's just, I think it's almost if I remember correctly and I may have
blocked this bit out because I think I just got that bit and then that was it. But I think he comes out
and then it's almost like he comes out and stands up and then the camera shots a different
scene. So it's like it's completely left open ended.
But anyway, the point I'm making about that is like if that lives rent free in my head and I know
that that's fiction. Yeah. What's the actual fuck? Like what sort of mental gymnastics do you have
to do with your own brain to try and forget that I would never answer a video call again in my life.
No. Ever. No.
It just would not be I would just not have a phone. I would probably go and live like a hermit in a
cave. Just be like, no, no people.
Thank you. No. I'm good.
No, no. I'm all OK over here on my own. Thank you.
Fuck that. And then the trauma, the trauma and she's pregnant. We make the assumption that it's
Jack's baby.
I think so. I don't know the level of fucking like I would not meaning to be flippant, but you would.
You'd sleep with one eye open.
You would. Of course. Oh, horrid.
Blatter. Oh, well, now that you've sufficiently traumatised us all. I suppose.
You're welcome. I suppose we are done for the week. Cool.
Thanks for that, mate. Oh, dear. No, but honestly, thank you very much.
I'm sorry if anybody does know more about it or if this goes anywhere and anyone else hears it
that was involved. And when I said about Don't email me, I'll cry. Like, that's not true.
Do feel free to initiate a conversation if you would like one. We have. If I've got anything wrong,
like I'm not above being told.
No, exactly. Unless it's Rachel telling me. Oh, yeah, I'm not allowed to tell her she's wrong.
No, she could tell me that the sky was pink and I'd just go, yes, OK, it's fine. But no, and we have,
you know, full transparency. We have had people who have been close to the cases that we've
covered reach out to us in the past.
And I will. I'm going to put it out here. Every single person that has has been incredibly.Bar one, there was one. And you're smiling because you remember the one I'm talking about. But
they knew they knew the perpetrator, so I don't care.
But the any of the victims, the relatives or people who are close to it who have reached out to us
have always been incredibly sweet, incredibly kind to us and are telling of the stories. Yeah. They
have been they have cleared up things where we may have, you know, got something slightly
wrong or they've given us additional detail about the the person that we're talking about.
Yeah. Which I think is I just context. Yeah, exactly.
But it's always been very much with a lot of love that they've gotten in touch to kind of tell us a bit
more about the person, which is always lovely because it is just. I like to know more about the
people we talk about. And I hope that.
The families, if they do listen to these. Well, hopefully we do enough. We treat it with enough
respect.
Hopefully. But yeah, look, mate, you did an absolutely banging top glass job. Thank you.
With the limited info you had. So thank you very, very much. Obviously, what we'll do is I'll put in
the show notes.
I think I'm going to start doing this for any of the ones we do about mental health. I'm going to put
in the show notes anywhere that if people are sort of concerned about someone or themselves.
Yeah.
That they can get in touch. Exactly. Resources for support.
I will definitely be doing the UK if there's, you know, see what else we can do. But we'll put some
of that in. So if anyone has been impacted by this or, you know, there's something for you to go
and look at.
But yeah. OK. That was all that's really left to say is Trevor's.
We bloody love you. We really do. You are all wonderful creatures and we bid you adieu.
Have lovely weeks. Look after yourselves and each other. Yeah.
See you next week. Yeah. Love you.
Bye bye. Love you. Bye.