It was 12.30 a.m. on a warm but rainy summer night. A minibus taxi stopped on a neon-lit road in a quiet Welsh village. An attractive female passenger and two small girls got out and climbed the short flight of steps leading to the front door of an ordinary suburban semi. The driver watched as the woman turned the key in the lock before she and the girls slipped inside, closing the door behind them. Almost three years afterwards, recalling aloud his thoughts at that moment for the benefit of a jury, the taxi driver said: ‘They’re safe now.’
Four hours later, at 4.27 a.m. on Sunday 27 June 1999 the Emergency Control Centre in Newport received a 999 call. It was the first of several urgent calls the Centre was to receive that night from an area north of Swansea. The message was immediately relayed to the South Wales Fire Service headquarters in Carmarthen which, in turn, notified the two fire stations nearest to the location of the alarm. ‘Red Watch’ fire crews at Morriston and Pontardawe, two small industrial towns to the north of Swansea, were instantly alerted to the emergency by a loud bell, a flashing red light and a fax message which spewed out simultaneously in the two fire stations.
The 999 call came from the Sunnybank district of Clydach, a sprawling village situated on the western slopes of the lower Swansea Valley. Minutes before, at 4.20 a.m. Robert Wachowski, a BP chemical worker, had looked out of his bedroom window after hearing banging and smashing noises coming from 9 Kelvin Road, the house almost directly opposite his home. His first thoughts were that someone was tampering with cars in the street but then, in the half-light, he saw clouds of white smoke billowing from the rear of the house. He wondered if someone had set fire to a bag of rubbish and rang the occupant of number 9, Mandy Power, on her landline. When she failed to answer, he tried her mobile number, but again got no reply. Wachowski dressed quickly, ran across the road, banged on the front door of the threatened house and shouted for Mandy to wake up. He then ran around to the back of the house, where he found that the kitchen was blazing fiercely.
Donald Jones, another neighbour, was woken by his mother, who ran screaming into his bedroom. He rushed out to help Wachowski. Together the two men hammered on the front door and windows and shouted warnings as they desperately tried to rescue the family they believed were trapped inside. As they attempted to force open the front door, they were beaten back by thick smoke. Running to the back of the house, they found the french doors swinging open, the double-glazed windows shattered and the window frames buckled by the intense heat. Again they were beaten back, this time by a wall of flames. Wachowski recalled later: ‘I looked up at Katie and Emily’s room and thought, “I hope they’re not in there.”’ Desperate to help, he shouted to Rosemary Jones, who lived opposite number 9, asking her to ring for the fire service. Moments later a powerful Dennis fire engine, one of two on permanent standby at Morriston Fire Station, was on its way, and a fire support Land Rover followed closely behind.
Number 9 Kelvin Road, a semi-detached three-bedroom house, was built around the mid-1950s. It is one of about sixty houses, all of a similar style, rising on either side of Kelvin Road, between Gellionnen Road to the east and Tan Yr Allt Road to the west, at one point intersected by Carlton Road. The house occupies a slightly elevated site on the north side of the road. Six stone steps rising from the pavement meet a short path dividing a small patchy lawn fenced by low wrought-iron railings. From there it takes just three paces to reach the front door. A path on the right leads round the side of the house to the back garden.
During their journey, the fire crew maintained radio contact with South Wales Fire Service in Carmarthen. The crew assumed that they would be dealing with a straightforward house fire, but John Campbell, the commanding officer, was prepared for anything, or so he thought. Headquarters had received conflicting reports as to whether the occupants of the burning house were still inside, and no one knew for certain whether or not they would be looking for survivors. Shortly before the fire engine arrived, controllers confirmed that there was at least one person in the house.
Off-duty firefighter Adrian Humphries was the first emergency services worker to arrive at the scene. He lived in Kelvin Road, just a few doors away, and was dozing in his armchair when his wife shook him awake to tell him about the fire. He rushed to the burning house and asked if anyone was inside. Someone said, ‘No, she’s out.’
As the Morriston fire engine turned into Kelvin Road, crew member Neil MacPherson and his team strapped on self-contained breathing apparatus. He readied himself to lead the search for the people trapped inside the house. He and John Campbell were both 30-year veterans, with extensive experience of house fires, road traffic accidents and numerous other fire-related incidents. Up to that night, they thought they had seen it all.
Even before the fire engine came to a complete halt, Campbell had issued his orders. Onlookers moved aside and the crew saw for themselves that the house was well and truly ablaze. Campbell instructed MacPherson to lead a search for casualties or trapped individuals. Floodlights were turned on and directed towards the house while oxygen cylinders were prepared in anticipation of resuscitating survivors affected by smoke inhalation. Within seconds of the Morriston crew’s arrival, a second fire engine, from Pontardawe, pulled up at the house. Now, ten firefighters were involved, plus those who had travelled separately in the Morriston support Land Rover.
Robert Wachowski told the firemen that the stairs were on the right, just inside the front door, then retreated to a safe distance where he and his other neighbours watched as the dreadful events unfolded. MacPherson, wearing a fire protection suit, was the first of a two-man team to force his way into the blazing house, kicking in the front door as he went. Fire officers Spencer Lewis, Huw Thomas and Peter Bringloe followed closely behind. Battling through the flames and thick blinding smoke, they felt their way upstairs on their hands and knees, their noses just inches from the stair carpet.
As they reached the landing, one of the firemen swept the floor with a gloved hand and discovered the first body. MacPherson gathered up a limp little girl whom he described as ‘light and small’. She was blackened by smoke. He carried her downstairs and out through the front door. As John Campbell went to help him, vomit spewed from the child’s mouth over the front of Campbell’s jacket, giving him the impression that she was still alive. They passed the child to Adrian Humphries, and together helped him lay her on the grass where MacPherson tried to resuscitate her.
Huw Thomas, a fireman from Pontardawe, found another small child upstairs as he felt his way on his hands and knees through the dense smoke. She too was carried downstairs and passed to Humphries. He later described the child as ‘very grey-looking’. Then the firemen brought out a third body: a dark-haired young woman. Smoke had blackened her entire naked body and, oddly, a pink vibrator was lodged in her vagina.
All three bodies were laid on the ground and covered with blankets, leaving only their heads exposed. For several long minutes the firemen tried to revive them. While MacPherson continued working on the first little girl, Humphries worked on the second. MacPherson applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Certain that he detected a heartbeat, he tried hard to coax a response from her.
At 4.41 a.m. a team of paramedics arrived and took over the medical care of the victims. Paramedic Eric Thomas ran to the three victims the firefighters were trying to revive. He helped those working on the young woman who, he saw, had an injury to the side of her face. He would say later that ‘there was always a chance that she was alive, but, given the extent of her injuries, we decided then it was a lost cause and we stopped.’ Clearly Mandy Power was dead.
Thomas’ colleague, ambulance technician Barry Pierpoint, who had also tried to resuscitate one of the children at the scene, would later say that ‘it was quite obvious that very serious injuries had been sustained’. He observed that the fire officers appeared to be ‘quite shocked and distressed’ by the condition of the three bodies.
The paramedics were unable to properly fit oxygen masks on the faces of the little girls. One of the paramedics noted that neither of them appeared to be breathing, and both had sustained extensive head injuries. Another paramedic said to Neil MacPherson, who was still trying to revive one of the girls, later identified as Katie Power: ‘You’re going to have to stop. I’m afraid they’ve all gone.’ As MacPherson pulled his gloved hand away from the back of the child’s head, he saw that it was covered in blood.
The firemen quickly realised that the injuries could not have been caused by the fire. Given their extent and nature, it was obvious that they had been deliberately inflicted. All efforts to revive the victims using first aid and oxygen ceased, and the medical team packed away their equipment and left.
MacPherson re-entered the burning house to search for more casualties. By now the fire was under control and the smoke was less dense. In an upstairs back bedroom, he found the dead body of an elderly woman still in bed. She too had sustained terrible facial and head injuries and was covered in blood. Leaving her where she lay, he retreated from the bedroom. On the landing he saw flesh, pieces of bone and pools of blood. Looking into the bathroom, he saw a bath, partially filled with water which contained more blood. Descending the stairs, he saw that the walls, doors and ceilings were also spattered with blood. He said later: ‘I had never seen anything like this in one incident.’
It was clear that 9 Kelvin Road was a crime scene. It was a startling development, but fire crews often find themselves in unusual situations and have either been trained, or have learned, to deal with most of them. A short coded message was sent to the South Wales Fire Service: a dead body had been found. Code is used to prevent amateur radio enthusiasts from intruding into emergency services’ wavebands to pick up and disperse sensitive information before the authorities might wish it to be released. The same code is used regardless of the number of deaths. The message does not state the cause of death, so the emergency services operatives who receive it have no way of knowing the number of bodies found, or whether death was the result of an accident or foul play. Despite having alerted their colleagues to the loss of life, only the personnel on the scene were aware of the extent or cause of the shocking discoveries.
The fire crew was simply not trained or properly equipped to deal with a crime of this magnitude. When Police Constable Alison Crewe, an Acting Sergeant, arrived at Kelvin Road, she immediately realised the seriousness of the situation, and radioed her senior officer, Detective Inspector Stuart Lewis, who was also on duty that night, telling him he was urgently required. Lewis was an experienced police officer and had been a member of the South Wales Police Force for more than twenty years. He had investigated numerous serious crimes, including two murders that had resulted in convictions.
When Detective Inspector Lewis arrived at Kelvin Road, his seniority effectively placed him in charge of the crime scene. John Campbell, Eric Thomas and shortly afterwards Alison Crewe all told him that the victims had not died as a result of the fire but from injuries inflicted on them. Three of the bodies were still laid out on the lawn in front of the house, and Lewis could see this for himself. This was a multiple murder and demanded the highest level of priority and immediate action. But the house was still on fire and the crime scene was overrun by firemen whose primary concern was to make it safe and minimise risk, rather than to preserve evidence for use in any future criminal proceedings.
However, Detective Inspector Lewis knew full well the steps needed to be taken in a situation such as this: taking command, restricting access to the crime scene and preserving evidence so that the criminal investigation could begin promptly. He also knew that everything had to be done strictly by the book, otherwise valuable time might be wasted, important clues missed and even vital evidence contaminated and rendered useless for legal purposes, or even lost for ever. But to this day, for reasons known only to himself, Lewis took none of these steps and, instead, quickly removed himself from the scene.