London - Every morning, Christopher Hampton, a painter and decorator, would emerge from his home in the suburbs of Bristol in his white overalls, kiss his wife goodbye on the doorstep, then drive off to work in his silver Toyota. It was a routine which rarely wavered and seemed to epitomise their happy marriage.
The couple moved into the neat end-of-terrace in the Fishponds district nearly two decades ago. The neighbourhood was a decent place in which to bring up their children, with local parks and other amenities.
They did a good job as parents. Their daughter Amy recently got engaged and her brother Darren is a consultant in the insurance industry.
Hampton grafted tirelessly to provide for them when they were growing up. After starting out with a local decorating firm he went freelance and was employed mainly on big commercial contracts in the Bristol area. At the age of 64, his skills were still very much in demand.
His wife, Julie, 55, meanwhile, worked part-time in a shop. ‘She was really smashing,’ said someone who lived a few doors away.
“She used to pop in to see me most mornings after my wife died a few years ago to make sure everything was all right.”
“They invited me to spend Christmas with them the first year. It was a lovely thought, but my own daughters lived locally so I didn’t take up the offer.”
All in all, no one could have wished for better neighbours than ‘Chris and Julie,’ a view shared by almost everyone who knew them in the street.
Until one morning last July when the police arrived at their front door and a scene we have all seen many times on TV began to unfold in real life. “You do not have to say anything,” Hampton was informed, “but it may harm your defence . . . “
He was then led away in handcuffs as a forensic team in white boiler suits moved in to search the house andgarden.
An officer present that day recalled how, as he was being arrested, his wife asked whether she would see him that evening. Hampton replied: “No, you won’t.” His wife then asked: ‘Will I see you tomorrow?” Again he replied: “No, you won’t.”
The reason, although she did not know it, was contained in a faded newspaper cutting from 1984. ‘Frenzied knifeman kills A-level girl,’ was the headline.
The girl was 17-year-old Melanie Road, whose mutilated body was found 200 yards from her home in Bath. Road was attacked the previous night, the report said, after leaving a city centre club. She was raped as she lay dying.
But the maniac responsible for the atrocity — for what happened to Melanie was more than just murder —remained at large for more than 30 years.
That man, it was yet to dawn onhis wife, it was her own husband, the man they had just taken away and who was finally brought to justice at Bristol Crown Court this week where he was jailed for life for Road’s murder.
She has not been seen in public since her husband was sent down. Neighbours say she is too frightened and ashamed to leave her house. Her door goes unanswered to callers.
”His second family [Julie, Amy and Darren] all speak highly of him as a husband and father,” said the barrister who represented Hampton.
Unlike some of the most notorious predators of recent times, his defining characteristic was his ‘ordinariness’.
The lawyer who defended Hampton said, in mitigation, that his client was a man ‘whose character either side of events that day in June 1984 [the day Road was killed] was otherwise positively good and entirely unblemished’.
Only an extraordinary twist linked Hampton to Road’s death in the first place.
It began with the unrelated arrest of his daughter —from his first marriage — for a petty domestic dispute in 2014, which meant her DNA was taken and added to the police database.
Scientists, using the latest DNA techniques, found a partial match to frozen samples of Melanie’s killer’s DNA from the original crime scene in Bath. The development led detectives to her family and eventually to take a sample from her father, which proved that he was Road’s sexually-driven killer.
“I find it very difficult to believe this was a one-off incident, largely because of the severity of it,” Dr Jane Monckton-Smith, a leading criminologist, told Daily Mail after Hampton’s trial ended.
‘The fact he [Hampton] managed to go back to normal is a sign that the man is a psychopath. Serial killers typically display such behaviour — an ability to return to normality after doing something dreadful.’
There are certainly disturbing similarities between Road’s murder in 1984, and that of another woman, 25-year-old Melanie Hall, in 1996. Not only did they share the same first name, they were also murdered on the same date, June 9. And both were grabbed after leaving a Bath nightclub.
But at this stage detectives do not believe there is any connection between the two murders. Nor have they found any evidence that Hampton committed any othercrime.
Criminologists say that individuals capable of doing what Hampton did to Road often display a sociopathic streak — such as being cruel to animals — during childhood.
”No, never,” his brother Michael Hampton, who lives in Somerset, told the Mail. “It has come as a complete and utter shock to me.”
“The only time I can ever remember Chris being in any bother was when he was nine or ten. He had a catapult and he used it to put a stone through the window of a bus.”
“He was given a good hiding by our father. But apart from that, there was nothing. He was a quiet kid.”
It was during his school years that he met Pauline Day, a pupil at a local convent school, who became his first wife.
“They were inseparable,” said Michael. “They really were sweethearts. We always knew Chris and Pauline would get married.”
Pauline was already pregnant with their first child, a daughter Clare, when they began married life in 1972. Clare was the daughter, of course, whose arrest years later would inadvertently lead to her father’s capture.
”Chris worked really hard and went home to his family,” said a former colleague. “I don’t have a bad word to say about him.”
Even so, the marriage to Pauline only lasted a few years. They split up shortly after the birth of their third child.
Not long afterwards, Hampton moved into a flat in Broad Street, Bath, with a girl he had started dating. He was 32 — and was about to rape and kill.
His victim, Melanie Road, lived half a mile from Broad Street in the suburb of Lansdown with her mother Jean, a teacher, and father Anthony, a former Ministry of Defence civil servant. A milkman on his round discovered her body on that June morning in 1984. She had been stabbed 26 times in the chest and back and been sexually assaulted.
Five years later, Hampton married Julie, the woman he would spend the next 16 years of his life with as a loving husband and father.
“He [the groom) was always a gentleman,” said a guest at the couple’s wedding who has asked not to be named.
The bride, Julie Alexander, as she was before she walked down the aisle, had a six-year-old son (Darren) from a previous relationship. Hampton raised the boy as his own. Two years later Amy was born.
How could anyone have known the truth about the devoted family man who had just moved to this leafy corner of the city? Had his daughter Clare, now in her 40s, not fallen foul of the police two years ago in a petty domestic dispute with her boyfriend, then, quite probably, no one would ever have known.
Gary Mason, a retired police officer, was the person who contacted Hampton after a ‘familial match’ had been made with his daughter. Hampton agreed voluntarily to give him a swab sample. They met in a car park in Bristol near where Hampton was working in June last year.
“I told him it would take ten to 15 minutes of his time,” said Mason. “He remained extremely calm and showed no emotion at all.”
A month later, Hampton was arrested at his home. Once again, he showed no emotion. He made no reply when cautioned about his rights, nor did he make any comment during three days of police interviews.
His ever-loyal wife stood by him, visiting him several times a week with daughter Amy. But that was before he changed his plea to guilty at the start of his trial this week.
“To think he had been harbouring this secret for all these years is unbelievable,” said neighbour Peter Rew. “I feel so sorry for Julie — she’s also a victim in all this. Imagine living with someone like that, sleeping together and bringing up children together.”
“It was obvious she had no idea what Chris had done. That poor woman is frightened to go out of her house because of what people might say to her about him.”
But what about Road’s heartbroken mother?
She dropped her daughter off near a city centre hotel in Bath on the afternoon of June 9, 1984. “Look, there’s a red carpet laid out for me,” she joked. “What a way to go.”
They would be the last words Road ever heard her daughter speak — and it would be the last time she saw her alive.
“I was 49 years old in 1984 when all this happened”, said Road, reading from a statement in court this week. “Now in my 81st year I pray that the family will find some peace. Over the past 30 years we have gradually been torn apart by this evil deed.”
Christopher Hampton might have finally confessed, but even now there is no apology. No remorse. No sign of a conscience.
This was the real Christopher Hampton — a side he had kept hidden from everyone for all these years.
Daily Mail