HBO's 'Landscapers' Tells the True Story of a Bizarre Double Murder
Susan and Christopher Edwards kept to themselves. A quiet, odd-to-many couple, they spent all of their time together in their flat in London's East End, and all of their money on signed Hollywood and WWII memorabilia. Though Susan’s parents, William and Patricia Wycherley, disappeared one day in May of 1998 from their semi-detached home in Forest Town, Mansfield, none of the neighbors seemed to think twice when their daughter showed up and explained that they had moved to Ireland to enjoy some of that good, clean air in their old age. That changed 15 years later, when Christopher called his stepmother from France, asked for money, and confessed that the couple had buried Susan’s parents in their own backyard over a decade earlier. A new HBO limited series Landscapers starring Olivia Colman and David Thewlis documents the shocking true story.
The Edwardses are living in France when the show, written by Coleman's husband, Ed Sinclair, and directed by Will Sharpe, opens. They'd moved from London in 2012, after the U.K.’s Department for Work and Pensions sent Susan’s long-since-dead father, William, a letter congratulating him on his 100th birthday and requesting a face-to-face meeting to assess his benefits. The couple had been collecting his pension for years, and sensing that their jig may finally be up, fled. However, they quickly ran out of money once abroad, and so Christopher called his stepmother to ask for some, and confessed to her that they had been involved in an unfortunate situation which led to Susan’s parents being buried in their own backyard. Chris’s stepmother called the police.
The home that the Wycherleys had lived in had sold years earlier with a new family now living there, so digging up the backyard on an elderly woman’s tip about a double murder that no one had ever heard of wasn't exactly getting the okay from the local police. But after some investigating revealed both that William and Patricia Wycherley’s doctors appointments had ceased in 1998 and that they had never been present for real estate agents when their home was sold, an excavation began. Human remains were found in the yard, and the weapon was identified as a second world war service revolver—a collectible.
Soon after the bodies were identified, Chris sent a polite email to the police that the couple would be taking the train back to England to turn themselves in. They arrived on October 30, 2013 with no money or belongings, besides a suitcase of film and war memorabilia. The story they told the police then is the same one presented in the series: Susan was visiting her parents alone one weekend when she heard a gunshot, and entered her parents room to find her mother had shot her father dead. After her mother "provoked" Susan, by admitting that she knew that her father had sexually abused Susan throughout her childhood and blamed her daughter for ruining their marriage, Susan herself picked up the gun and shot her mother. She then wrapped the bodies in the duvet and went back to her flat in London for the week. The following weekend, she brought Chris back to the house, they ate fish and chips and watched Eurovision, and then she told him that her parents were dead upstairs. He dug a grave in the backyard and in the middle of the night, they buried the bodies.
The police began to poke holes in their very detailed story. It is nearly impossible that Chris Edwards, one week after the bodies began decomposing, did not immediately smell them when he entered the home to watch TV and eat fish and chips, they reasoned. If Susan had shot her mother Patricia in an unexpected fit of anger, why did she go to the bank the very next business day and open up a joint account for her and her mother so that she could access her parents’ savings, and spend the next fifteen years collecting their pensions, disability benefits, and winter fuel allowances? The Wycherleys had both been shot twice in the chest carefully and expertly, shots the police doubted Patricia or Susan could have fired in a heat-of-the-moment rage. During an interview, Christopher admitted that he belonged to a gun club, and that he was an experienced shooter. Susan spent years writing to her parents’ doctors to excuse them from appointments and vaccinations, as well as sending holiday cards to their extended family about their travels in Ireland. The facts all led the police to believe that the double murder had been premeditated, and that William and Patricia had been killed for their money.
Susan and Christopher stole a total of £285,286 ($377,993) from her parents after their deaths. As is depicted in Landscapers, Susan felt that her parents had stolen an inheritance left to her from her grandmother, which her parents had used to buy a former home and sell it at a profit after she’d signed away her rights. Despite the stolen cash, Susan and Chris were perpetually broke, spending thousands of dollars on signed Gary Cooper collectibles and counting pennies when it came to their groceries. They had spent over £15,000 on the memorabilia found in their suitcase upon their return to England, at which point they were £160,000 in debt. The police had their collectibles appraised upon their arrests: their collection was at most worth £3,000.
The story that Susan and Chris told the police implicated her of manslaughter, and him of abetting a crime and concealment of a corpse. In their June 2014 trial, they were both convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 25 years each. Today, they remain in two separate prisons in England.
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