Christopher Foster
– Deadly Intent
Christopher Foster’s last act was to get into bed with his dead wife Jill. She was dead because he had shot her in the head. As well as his own wife of 21 years, Foster had shot dead his 15-year-old daughter, Kirstie, in her bedroom. At 3.10 am, he then used his .22 rifle to shoot dead the family’s dog and horses, before setting fire to the stables. After this, he calmly proceeded to pour 200 gallons of oil into his five-bedroom country home, Osbaston House, near Maesbrook in Shropshire, England. Foster drove his horsebox to the gates of the property, making any attempt at entry difficult for the emergency services. Just to make sure, he shot out the tyres. He then lit the fire, went upstairs and got into bed. He died of smoke inhalation.
The first anyone outside knew of what was unfolding was when ADT Security received a fault message on Foster’s alarm system at 3.44 am, indicating something was wrong with the alarm in the library. There was no answer when ADT tried to call. Soon all the alarms were going off, and at 3.51 am the power went off completely. Meanwhile, neighbours reported hearing shots and explosions coming from the property.
Around the same time, the fire service received a 999 call for a reported fire at Osbaston House. When they and the police arrived on the scene, the scale of the blaze took them by surprise. That someone had put a horsebox at the gates and shot out the tyres indicated that whoever had started the fire did not want it to be put out. It took 12 fire crews several days to contain the flames. The police were forced to stand and watch as vital evidence went up in smoke. ‘It was like a clay oven turning everything to ash,’ said Detective Superintendent Jon Groves who led the investigation.
At first, speculation was rife about what had taken place and why. But when the police made it clear they were not looking for anyone else in relation to the incident, it became apparent that they were dealing with a tragedy. And when Foster’s own CCTV footage was looked through, it was clear what had taken place.
The police found Chris and Jill’s bodies by accident, while taking forensic pictures. They were revealed to have fallen through the burned floor from above while still entwined. A loaded rifle, complete with silencer, was recovered from near his body.
Friends and relatives were shocked and horrified that Foster could have done such a thing. ‘I think what Chris Foster did was the most despicable thing I’ve ever had to deal with,’ said forensics officer Dominic Black in a newspaper interview. ‘As a father, he had been put on this planet to protect that girl. She was in her own home, in her own bedroom, with her own parents. The safest place in the world for anybody and he takes her life. That fills me with horror.’
The coroner’s inquest confirmed what the police had deduced. Firearms expert Phillip Rydeard told the coroner that the recovered gun was a German-made .22 bolt-action rifle. He also confirmed that the three fragments of lead recovered from Jill Foster’s skull were consistent with having been fired from the weapon. And the wound in Kirstie’s skull was typical of a gunshot. It was a nightmare.
Quite how Foster could have turned a gun on his own wife and daughter we shall never know. Perhaps even harder to take for friends and family is that only hours beforehand, the family had enjoyed a day’s clay pigeon shooting and barbecue. A photograph from the party, showing a smiling Christopher, Jill and Kirstie, was published soon after the incident. There was no sign of the impending tragedy. John Hughes, who hosted the event, said that during the day Foster seemed in very good spirits. But while Jill and Kirstie wanted to stay, Christopher was insistent that they left early. He already knew what was coming.
Guests from the barbeque do recall Foster mentioning that ‘Russians owed him money’, but no one thought anything of it. In reality, Foster’s business dealings had been on a downward trajectory for some time.
Christopher Foster came from fairly humble roots. His father was said to have sold mattresses door to door in Blackpool, while Foster’s own first job was as an apprentice electrician. His and Jill’s first home was a suburban new build in Wolverhampton, a metropolitan borough of the West Midlands in England. He went on to become an insulation salesman, but it was while watching the unfolding Piper Alpha oil platform disaster that he had his eureka moment. The event prompted Foster to invent a new type of insulation that could protect the valves on oil platforms from being destroyed. Oil firms showed interest, but wanted proof that it worked. So he remortgaged his house, purchased £5,000 worth of gas to use in the demonstration, and according to his mother, Enid, stood there with his fingers crossed as the fire raged. After the flames died down, the values were untouched. His product, UlvaShield, worked.
This was Foster the entrepreneur. He did what few professional people would do, remortgaged his house for an idea that he had no guarantee would work. Up to this point, no one had backed him; no one supported him. The bank only loaned money it knew it would get back. Foster was on his own. It was his finest moment. It is just a pity he could not exercise such judgement and character throughout the rest of his business career.
Foster set up Ulva Ltd in 1998, based in Rugeley, Staffordshire, and the following year he managed to secure a £500,000 export deal with backing from British Trade International to supply thermal insulation for Petro-Canada, a Canadian oil company. Foster’s company was soon turning over £1.5 million annually, and he claimed that he was winning every offshore construction project that he targeted in Britain. There was also talk of Ulva winning a lucrative contract to supply insulation to the new 1,100-mile Caspian pipeline, which runs from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, through Azerbaijan and Turkey. It is hard to overestimate the impact a contract like this would have had on the small company. In the multi-billion-dollar oil industry, it would have placed Ulva in the big league.
Foster was at the top of his game. There can be few better moments for entrepreneurs than when the world, however small that world, appears to be taking notice of them and buying their product, service or idea. Making even the smallest amount of money can be vindication for months or years of effort, although in Foster’s case, he was raking it in. ‘He was making money hand over fist,’ said his mother. ‘He had so much that he didn’t know what to do with it.’ It did not take him long.
Apparently Foster’s wife Jill first saw Osbaston House up for sale in Shropshire Life magazine. That was on a Thursday. They viewed it on Saturday and bought it, with £1 million cash, that very afternoon. Foster was said to have spent another £200,000-plus on antiques and furniture for the property. When the family moved into the property, Foster apparently arrived with two Range Rovers to impress the neighbours. His car collection also included at different times a Bentley, matching ‘his and hers’ Porsches, a Ferrari, an Aston Martin and a silver Jaguar. He also bought horses for Kirstie, who was sent to the private Ellesmere College, a few miles away. And why not? Foster had worked hard and pulled off an incredible business coup. Why not let the world see the spoils of this effort?
Foster’s passion became shooting. Gun ownership is strictly regulated in the United Kingdom, with anyone owning a weapon requiring a licence, or firearm certificate. To obtain a firearm certificate, the police must be convinced that a person has ‘good reason’ to own each gun, and that they can be trusted with it ‘without danger to the public safety or to the peace’. Around 1 million people regularly shoot in the United Kingdom, creating an industry worth around £1.6 billion.
Foster certainly had cause to own weapons. He joined the local gun club, and would shoot up to four days a week. Coming in at some £4,000 per day, it was not cheap. One year he reportedly spent £80,000 on shooting, and he ordered custom-made shotguns from Purdey and Beretta that cost £70,000 and £35,000 respectively. There was no reason to believe that Foster would turn the guns on his own family.
It was not the guns that should have concerned those working with Foster, though. Spending so much time away from a young and growing business was a bad idea, particularly in the case of Ulva when it was on the verge of a real global breakthrough. And it was not just the shooting that was occupying his time.
First, there was a dispute to do with a property deal in Cyprus. In 2006, Foster complained to the police that two men, Tim Baker and Leo Dennis, were attempting to bribe him – a charge they strongly denied. Dennis claimed the bribery accusation was a smokescreen to cover up the fact that Foster had offered him £50,000 to kill his mistress’s husband. The lurid claims and counter claims were soon dismissed by Shrewsbury Crown Court and the two were cleared, but it shone a light on the sort of murky business world in which Foster moved – and showed how he had clearly taken his eye off issues at Ulva. Worse was to follow.
Foster’s company Ulva had an exclusivity agreement with its main supplier, Cambridge-based DRC Distribution, a subsidiary of the SWP Group. But with his business running into trouble, Foster found a cheaper supplier in the United States. At the same time, DRC was finding it harder and harder to get paid on time. The situation deteriorated when DRC claimed breach of contract and Ulva served notice of termination of the contract. A contractual battle ensued, and by July 2007 the case ended up before the High Court. Ulva accepted that it was in breach of contract, and the judge suggested that ‘morally’ Ulva was in the wrong, leaving DRC out of pocket but in a position to claim back damages, believed to be around £800,000.
All the time the legal dispute had rumbled on, Foster had been secretly transferring the bulk of Ulva’s assets to either himself or a new ‘phoenix company’, called Ulva Holdings, of which he was the director. On 29 June 2007 Ulva ceased to trade, and when Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs threatened to wind up the company, Foster brought in the administrators.
DRC refused to be fobbed off without payment of the damages due to it, and applied to the court to have Ulva’s administrators removed. The Court of Appeal agreed: Foster’s scam did not work. Lord Justice Rimmer said that the share transfer deal was ‘an asset stripping exercise directed at enabling him to carry on his business through another company with a similar name’. He added that Foster was ‘not to be trusted’. In May 2008, the judge ruled that the administrators were jointly liable with Foster for the £800,000 legal costs of DRC. The UK tax authorities were also on Foster’s back for unpaid taxes totalling about £1 million.
The most galling aspect of the case for Foster was that Ulva was bought by the SWP Group for a ‘nominal’ sum. It told investors that Foster’s former company offered international ‘growth possibilities of transformational proportions’, and listed the likes of BP, British Gas and Total as clients.
The final straw for Foster, though, may well have been the legal notice found pinned to the front gates of his Shropshire mansion. Addressed for the attention of Christopher Foster only, it was a legal order stopping Foster and his family from selling the property without authorization from the corporate liquidators.
The game was up. With creditors closing in and talk of dubious Russian business associates, it reached the point where Foster became so paranoid that he started keeping a handgun in his car – which is illegal in the United Kingdom. He also installed high electric gates, and told Belinda, his cleaner, to refuse entry to anyone who was not known to him.
It seems that events were spiralling out of control for Foster, and he apparently believed he had cause to fear for his life. By the end, he had assets of £3.1 million but debts of £4.4 million, including three mortgages on Osbaston House. He told a friend, Mark Bassett, that he would never let any liquidators take his home or possessions away from him, adding, ‘I would top myself before that. They would have to carry me out in a box.’ They did.
So what sort of man was Foster? For one thing, he obviously had a dark side, and some felt he was very much a Jekyll and Hyde character. While at times charming, he could also be headstrong and impulsive. He would apparently shoot his wife Jill’s doves if they got into the garage and left droppings on his car. And more frightening still, he reportedly shot Kirstie’s pet Labrador when it worried sheep and the angry farmer threatened to shoot it himself. A man that can shoot his daughter’s pet dog! Perhaps the writing was on the wall.
Peter Grkinic, a director of Foster’s former company Ulva, said Foster was ‘vindictive’. Talking about the threat of his assets being seized, Grkinic said Foster ‘took the view that if I can’t have it, nobody can have it’.
Foster’s GP, Dr William Grech, said that on three occasions in March 2008, Foster told him he was thinking of committing suicide. He said he was not sleeping and was stressed about his business situation. The doctor urged Foster to talk to his wife. He did not. Keith Ashcroft, a forensic psychologist, said his final act ‘looks like a man in a state of depression, faced by the threat of his house being repossessed, deciding to take his family’s lives to protect them from poverty. That is the fantasy.’
It was a tragic end to a story of promising entrepreneurial endeavour – and it did not have to be like that. Foster acted in a way common to many entrepreneurs who find themselves facing supposedly insurmountable problems. The usual response is to ignore the problems, become a fantasist or simply lie (to others and themselves). The big hope is the entrepreneur can ‘deal’ their way out of the problems.
In many ways, the characteristics required to become an entrepreneur can end up pushing people over the edge. In the beginning, entrepreneurs are alone, so they have to take themselves very seriously and give themselves an air of credibility. They become very good actors. Foster was a good actor. It is a fine line between bluff and deceit, between confidence and arrogance, between entrepreneur and con man. Entrepreneurs undoubtedly start to believe their own publicity and believe their own hype.
And Foster, looking around at his cars, country squire lifestyle, horses and shooting, certainly became lulled into a false sense of security. Like many entrepreneurs before him, he took his eye off the ball. Bored by the detail and preferring the upmarket lifestyle, he fell into a trap that a lot of successful entrepreneurs fall into. But the miracle of wealth creation often lies in its mundaneness. Once people lose track of the details, the bigger picture quickly starts to unravel.
The lessons from Foster’s tragic story are simple: stick to running what you know and keep doing what works. Foster was sidetracked by the lifestyle, by dubious property deals, and got mixed up with shady people who deflected his attention from what had got him where he was in the first place. He had a great business, which had global potential, but he blew it. Perhaps it was always beyond him. Maybe Christopher Foster rose above his station and simply did not know how to cope. He will not be the last.
SOURCES
DRC Distribution Ltd v Ulva Ltd [2007] EWHC 1716, 20 July 2007, High Court of Justice (Queen’s Bench Division)
Daily Mail, 3 April 2009
Daily Mail, 29 August 2008
Daily Telegraph, 2 April 2009
Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2009
Daily Telegraph, 27 August 2008
Guardian, 4 April 2009
Shropshire Star, 28 August 2008
Sunday Mirror, 31 August 2008
Sunday Times, 31 August 2008
SWP Group plc, www.swpgroupplc.com
The Times, 3 April 2009
The Times, 2 September 2008
ULVA Insulation Systems Ltd, www.ulva.co.uk