Shetland, on the island of West Burra. A cemetery occupies a grassy slope in
the loch-side settlement of Papil. Among the headstones is what appears to
be a fresh grave cut into the turf. There is a pebble-shaped boulder
engraved: “In loving memory of Richard, our brother and uncle.” Below
the cemetery, the grey surface of the loch is ruffled in the March wind;
above, rain drifts across the bleak hillside. This place marks the end of
what has been cast as a deeply poignant tale.
In January 2007, Richard Horne and his wife, Mandy, were buried here after
dying at their bungalow in Papil in what was widely reported to be a suicide
pact. Horne, under his adopted name Harry Horse, was a writer, illustrator,
cartoonist and musician whose versatility and originality touched genius.
Mandy had been stricken by an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis and they were
said to have died in each other’s arms – “like Romeo and Juliet”.
Yet there is much that is curious about the grave. First, 18 months on, it has
no permanent headstone. Second, there is no mention of Mandy. Third, only
Horne’s family knew him as Richard. To everyone else, including Mandy, he
was Harry. Beyond that, the grave guards a chilling secret. Until now, most
people who knew the couple believed they must have taken large quantities of
Mandy’s painkillers, and saw their deaths as the end of a deeply
moving love story, a tryst culminating in death because they could not bear
to be apart – or, as the Daily Mail put it, “the final expression of the
great love story that was their life together”.
In fact, when police from Lerwick arrived at the house on the morning of
January 10, 2007, they were confronted with a scene utterly at odds with the
media stories. Far from a suicide pact, these were deaths of horrifying
brutality. Because Scotland does not operate the same system of inquests as
in England, the gruesome details have never been officially released. Many
of the couple’s closest friends did not learn the truth for months after the
deaths. Those who did know, mostly the couple’s immediate families, have
been profoundly distressed by what occurred and uncertain about how much
they should reveal.
The quest for the truth about what happened at Papil, and why, means
confronting unsettling aspects of Harry’s life. He was charming, witty,
versatile – a polymath who reached creative heights in his art, writing and
music.
He was a tall, handsome figure with a winning smile and a beguiling interest
in the people he met. “His eyes would widen and there was a smile on his
face – all his interest was in what you did,” recalls the musician J J
Jamieson. But there was a dark side too: he was volatile, unpredictable and
prone to a volcanic anger.
The immediate problem in recounting Harry’s life is that there are competing
versions. His mother, Jo, offered hers during a six-hour interview in
February. It conflicts in crucial respects with accounts related by Harry in
interviews. The most significant disparities hold clues to explaining what
happened at Papil. For much of his life, Harry was on a quest for identity
that he could never resolve, contributing in large measure to his and his
wife’s deaths.
We met Jo and Derek Horne at their home in Warwickshire, a cottage in the
grounds of an elegant farmhouse. The Hornes lived in the farmhouse for 35
years before downsizing to the cottage in 2006. Harry and Mandy lived in the
cottage for five years during the 1990s, and Jo still regards it as her
son’s home. Mementos abound: his drawings adorn the walls, and his art work
is neatly stored away. “All his stuff is here,” she told us. “We’re living
in his house.” Soon after we arrived, Derek agreed to Jo’s proposal to spend
the day at his golf club, leaving her to present her account. As Jo tells
it, Richard had an idyllic childhood. She and Derek, a second-world-war
pilot who became a prosperous chartered surveyor, married in 1959. Richard
was born in May 1960, followed in three years by his three sisters, Kay,
Mary-Anne and Emma. Richard displayed his artistic talents from the age of
two. “We’d go on walks and he drew the animals we saw.” He was fond of
animals and a keen sportsman. “He had a great knowledge of birds by the time
he was 10 or 11. He loved cricket and rugger. He was just a lovely little
boy.”
Richard displayed an early talent for play-acting, riding a horse to church
and tethering it in the style of Clint Eastwood, and pretending to be a
car-park attendant when his parents held Christmas parties. However, he did
not fulfil his parents’ hopes in one crucial respect. After he attended a
local prep school and boarding school, they hoped he’d be accepted at
Malvern College. But he was weak at maths and they settled for Wrekin
College – where, his mother says, he flourished. “It was just a happy time
for him there and he said to me so many times, ‘Mum, that was the best thing
you ever did for me.’ ”
His parents were soon disappointed again. They were delighted when he joined a
local firm of solicitors, but he drew caricatures in court instead of taking
notes. “He looked very nice in his suit, but his heart wasn’t in it,” Jo
says. “He came home one night, threw everything down and said, ‘I’m not
doing that any more.’ ”
At the age of 18, Richard moved to Edinburgh – according to Jo, to follow a
woman he had fallen in love with. He later said he left home because his
parents wouldn’t let him go to art college – and for him, at least, it was
clearly a watershed, the moment when he attempted to write his early life
out of history. The journalist Alan Taylor, who first met Richard in 1983,
says: “As far as we could tell, he was an orphan.” Soon afterwards he
disowned his family name, calling himself Harry Horse (Harry was the name of
his grandfather, who was to feature in his children’s stories). “I think he
felt that by giving himself a new name and going to a new place, it was like
burning every bridge with the past,” says Taylor. The artist Paul Bloomer,
who knew Harry in Shetland, believes he was ashamed of his “upper-class
background… He didn’t want anything to do with that”. Harry reversed the
story when he told a Shetland gallery owner, Dorota Rychlik, that his
parents had disowned him “and did not approve of his career choice”.
Part of the genius of Harry Horse lay in the fact that he was self-taught,
both as an artist and as a musician. At first he hawked his portfolio around
publishers without success, but then, as he told it, drew on his play-acting
to make a breakthrough. In 1981 he called the publishers Canongate, who had
previously turned him down, pretending to be his own agent: his client was
in Edinburgh and they should see him. The ploy succeeded and he won his
first commission: to illustrate a children’s book. He next wrote and
illustrated his own children’s book, The Ogopogo: My Journey with the Loch
Ness Monster, which was published in 1983. It was followed by a series of
captivating stories featuring animals, illustrated in exquisite detail and
displaying all Harry’s talent for relating to children. “Kids loved him,” J
J Jamieson says.
“He knew how to speak to them and he loved making them happy.” He won copious
prizes for his books, the last three of which were published by Puffin, as
well as in the US and Europe.
Harry used his skill at role-playing to launch his career as a musician. In
1987, Jamieson went to see a new band named Swamptrash in a bar in
Edinburgh. The lead singer and banjo player was “a tall, skinny American
with confidence like I had never seen before”, Jamieson relates. The “tall
American” was Harry, who had reinvented himself as Billie Joe from Louisiana
and introduced his fellow musicians as his brothers – “all a hoax”, he said
later. He secured gigs by claiming that his band had been stranded in
Edinburgh after the festival and needed money for the flights home. “He had
such bravado,” says Jamieson. Even though he had little formal musical
knowledge (“He knew a few chords, that was it”), Swamptrash helped spawn a
new genre of Scottish folk-rock and Jamieson formed his own band, the
Critter Hill Varmints, soon after.
His friends have countless examples of his role-playing: posing as art
dealers, forging antique diaries, sending journalists on wild-goose chases.
While it kept them entertained, they could be taken aback by his anger. In
1983, Alan Taylor was working at Macdonald, publishers of The Ogopogo, when
Harry, whom he had never spoken to before, called. Harry was “incandescent
with rage” over the meagre returns revealed by his first royalty statement.
Other targets included the Edinburgh cultural elite, London, mediocrity,
large corporations, and – above all – politicians, whom he lacerated in
scabrous cartoons evoking Gillray and Cruikshank, which he contributed to
several Scottish newspapers. Taylor recalls his “incontinent unreasonable
anger” towards politicians. “His sheer animus towards Thatcherism was driven
beyond all rationality.” The first words he spoke to Dorota Rychlik, a
Shetland art dealer, were: “I hate f***ing dealers.” They were, he added,
“the parasites of the art world, profit-margin-obsessed, greedy individuals
with no true understanding of art”.
During his time in Edinburgh, Harry displayed an ambivalence towards his
family: despite seeming to have disowned them, he did stay in touch. His
mother tells how she visited him in Edinburgh, sent him money and paid his
bills. His sister Mary-Anne became exasperated by his calls to their
Warwickshire home. “I used to say, ‘Mum, it’s Richard. He obviously wants
money.’ ” But Jo insists: “He wasn’t a scrounger. It’s what mothers do… He
always used to say how proud he was of me and how he loved me.”
Harry and Mandy met when Swamptrash went to play a gig in Shetland in 1989.
Mandy, then in her early twenties, came from West Burra, where her father,
George Williamson, was a fisherman. It was, say their friends, a fairy-tale
relationship. “Harry was besotted with Mandy,” says Jamieson. “She was his
beautiful flower.” Alan Taylor saw Mandy as a “centre of sublime stillness”,
the counterpoint to Harry’s volatility. Harry’s sister Kay adds: “Mandy was
a special woman to be able to live with him. She knew how to handle him.”
The one person who didn’t take to Mandy was Jo. She points out that in
contrast to her son’s previous girlfriends, Mandy had almost no
qualifications and had worked as a fish-packer and nursing auxiliary. She
was also a goth. “She had these big black boots on and black hair… She
didn’t get a job, she wasn’t a nurse, she was nothing… My son, of all
people, fell for this girl. All the others had been so well educated; all
the others had degrees.”
The wedding, at the Church of Scotland Kirk on West Burra in March 1990, can
best be described as a culture clash. There was a gale blowing, with
horizontal rain; one Shetlander recalls an English woman clinging on to her
pillbox hat, and Harry’s family doing their best to dance to the Shetland
reels and two-steps. Jo felt discomfited by Mandy’s family, who, she
recalls, had not arranged flowers for the church and did not invite her
family back to their house afterwards to see the presents. “Her father
shoved them all into the garage,” Jo recalls, adding that these were “really
strange people, really strange”.
The newlyweds set up home in an Edinburgh flat. They were inseparable,
visiting editors together, Harry in a long black coat and hat, Mandy in a
miniskirt and Dr Martens. Mandy Suhr, Harry’s editor at Puffin, sees Mandy
as vital to Harry’s success: “She was a collaborator; she played a big part
in what he did.” They had one enduring sadness: they couldn’t have children.
And so a dog named Roo, who they found in a dogs’ refuge, became their
surrogate child, accompanying them to meetings and even becoming narrator in
Harry’s children’s stories.
Despite his successes, Harry never achieved financial security. He was
reluctant to illustrate others’ work, and resigned from Scotland on Sunday
following a customary display of anger when one of his cartoons was cropped.
He and Mandy had to leave their Edinburgh flat after falling behind with the
rent. Then a house they were buying in Kelso was repossessed. In 1995, at
his parents’ invitation, they moved into the cottage in Warwickshire. While
Jo was delighted to have her son close by, she did not relent in her view of
Mandy. “She couldn’t make friends, she criticised everything: his cricket,
his upbringing, going away to school. We had to be careful what we said… She
would sulk. We had nothing in common.” Worse still, “She wouldn’t wash his
cricket whites. She didn’t like him playing cricket because she didn’t like
the wives.”
In 2001 they returned to Scotland, living first in the southwest Highlands,
then near Perth. In 2004, Harry sent his mother a postcard that read: “Just
a line to let you now we’ve moved again – to Shetland this time… There are
lots of seabirds, Roo thinks she is young again…” His cheerful words
concealed the true reason for the move: Mandy had been diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis and wanted to be near her mother. The couple moved into a
bungalow 100 metres from her parents’ home, renting it from her brother who
had emigrated to New Zealand. Only later did Harry’s family and friends
learn what lay behind the move. J J Jamieson, who had moved to Shetland in
1989, recalls seeing Mandy limping soon after she and Harry arrived. “She
was a bit defensive and said there was nothing wrong. It was the first sign
of MS. They knew but hadn’t told anyone.”
Harry’s family viewed his move to Shetland as an unmitigated disaster. He told
one sister he was “in a living hell”. In another call he lamented: “I can’t
stand this place. Get me off this effing island. I’m stuck in this
godforsaken island. There’s no conversation.” Edinburgh, says Kay, “was the
place he loved to be. He’d put himself in a place where he was totally out
of communication with people”. But others found him far more positive about
Shetland. The landscape painter Paul Bloomer, who moved to Shetland in 1997,
met Harry after he had been walking on a nearby beach. “We instantly made a
connection through art,” says Bloomer. Harry “tried to get into the Shetland
way; he wanted to be part of it. I only ever saw him praising Shetland.”
Bloomer sees other virtues in Shetland. Compared with a big city, “there’s
nowhere to run… No distractions. You just have to confront yourself head-on”.
Some forms of MS are slow to develop, but Mandy’s was particularly aggressive.
She was soon confined to a wheelchair and her speech became impaired. Harry
was distraught, asking friends to imagine how it felt attending to the
bodily functions of the woman he loved. Her mother organised a rota of
neighbours and relatives to help care for her, while Harry tried to work in
the next room. He was immensely distressed when Roo died in May 2006.
As his predicament worsened, Harry was given to ever more disturbing bouts of
rage. He berated a Shetland art gallery for its pretentious paintings. He
punched a hole in a wall at home during a row with a social worker who was
disputing Mandy’s right to disability benefits. Meanwhile, his relations
with his family were reaching a terminal phase. In a series of cataclysmic
rows, he broke contact with each of them in turn. He told Derek he might
have been a good businessman but he was a lousy father. He accused one
sister of being an alcoholic, another of marrying for money. Jo says: “He
would berate me so much, I used to be in shreds. It took me days to get over
it, then he’d ring up and say he was so sorry, he didn’t mean it.”
Finally there were no more phone calls. His last conversation with any of them
was with Emma in August 2006, five months before the deaths on Papil. At the
same time, he appeared to be searching for an alternative family in Mandy’s
parents. George Williamson has said Harry once embraced both him and his
wife, Grace, saying: “You’re my family now.” But Harry’s bid to cast
Williamson as a surrogate father was fraught with problems, stemming from
their strong, competing personalities and Williamson’s misjudgments about
Harry. He once proposed taking Harry on a rabbit shoot – when killing furry
animals was anathema to Harry. “He was deeply offended by that,” confirms
Bloomer.
As they look back on the final months, Harry’s friends believe he was
distancing himself from them in readiness for what he was planning to do.
Bloomer last spoke to him in Lerwick in September. “He seemed to be quite
detached,” Bloomer says. “He said everything was fine.” But then Harry
apparently paraphrased William Blake: “Hell is here on Earth, it is written
on the faces of the people in the street.” Jamieson was finding Harry ever
more volatile and unpredictable: “You never knew when you called what kind
of reception you’d get – whether he’d say ‘Hi’ or put the phone down.”
Meanwhile, Harry was confiding his thoughts in a journal, which his sisters
read after his death. They report that he was raging at the “absolute
abortion” of a proposed book cover and was incensed by a proposal that
Penguin should make a bulk sale of one of his books to Virgin Atlantic,
netting him what he considered a pittance. He had also been hit with a tax
demand for £10,000. “He was desperately worried about money,” says Jo. “He
wanted to sack Penguin, he wanted to sack his agent… [he felt] they were all
screwing him, they were all taking their bit.”
As Christmas approached, his mood seemed more tranquil, as if he had achieved
some kind of acceptance. He painted pictures on a child’s bedroom wall to
thank her mother for caring for Mandy, and sold or gave away some of his
paintings. He gave Jamieson a rabbit poster for his son. “He’d never have
done that before,” says Jamieson. At other moments he still appeared to be
looking ahead. On New Year’s Eve he called an aunt – his father’s sister –
to tell her, according to Jo, that Mandy didn’t have long to live and that
he was looking forward to “coming home”. By now the rupture between Harry
and his family was so profound that his father was incensed that his sister
had even talked to him. A few days later, according to his journal, Harry
bought new tyres for his car and arranged an MoT test.
There are differing accounts of events on January 9. Mandy’s mother, Grace,
has said she visited Mandy as usual that morning. Mandy kissed her goodbye
and said “See you tomorrow”, referring to a planned trip to the dentist. Jo
says she and Derek were told by the police that Harry had a bitter row with
Mandy’s parents, and suspected that this was over whether Mandy should be
transferred to a hospice.
That evening, Harry and Mandy had their last visitors: two brothers from New
Zealand. As relayed by Williamson, Harry was in a demented state, roaming
the house and proclaiming: “It’s a wonderful night for a killing.” Mandy was
distressed, and did not want the friends to leave. At 9.40 the next morning,
January 10, the friends came back to retrieve an item of clothing. The front
door was unlocked, so they pushed it open. Inside they saw the bodies of
Harry and Mandy lying close together on Mandy’s bed. There was blood on the
floor, windows and walls. Harry, so it proved, had butchered Mandy to death
with a knife. By the medical examiner’s count, he had stabbed Mandy more
than 30 times, fetching a second knife after breaking the first inside her.
Then he turned the knife on himself, crisscrossing his arms with cuts and
mutilating his genitals, 47 wounds in all. The death certificates record
that both died of “exsanguination”: because he’d failed to deliver a lethal
blow, both had bled to death. As a final token of horror, he also killed
their dog, a chihuahua Mandy liked to cuddle, and their cat.
To the local police, this was an unprecedented event: there had not been a
murder in Shetland in 15 years. The bungalow at Papil was cordoned off and
forensic examiners were flown in from Aberdeen. It is one of the Horne
family’s grievances that days passed before they learnt how Harry and Mandy
had died. According to Jo, the Shetland police telephoned to ask permission
for the two to be buried together; from that call, and from another from the
undertaker, who said the couple died “like Romeo and Juliet”, they gave
their consent. Only on January 15 did a police liaison officer come to spell
out the hideous details. “She said, ‘I have to tell you that this was
a horrific ending. The doctor who attended hasn’t returned to work – it’s
the worst thing he has ever seen.’ ”
Even now the full details of the deaths have never been officially revealed.
Since Lerwick’s procurator fiscal, in tandem with the Crown Office in
Edinburgh, ruled that there was no need to hold a fatal-accident inquiry,
these details have not formally been made public. Even friends such as
Jamieson and Bloomer didn’t hear for months what had happened. It was Jo who
told us, saying she did so because Mandy’s father had been telling people in
Shetland. Her decision provoked a row in her family, who then withdrew any
further co-operation with our research. Meanwhile, Williamson agreed to an
interview and then changed his mind. Even so, he relayed graphic details of
the deaths through intermediaries, along with the message that he wanted it
known how his daughter had died.
Williamson was motivated partly by the bitter dispute that erupted between the
two families after the deaths. There had been no love lost between Jo Horne
and George Williamson, but trench warfare now broke out. Jo and Derek did
not attend the funeral after being told, Jo says, that they would not be
welcome. A there was no will, there were arguments over how the couple’s
possessions should be disposed of, now being conducted through solicitors.
Harry’s family eventually visited Papil to fetch his art work. The latest
point at issue is whether the two bodies should be exhumed and buried in
separate graves – the reason there is no headstone at the Papil cemetery.
Needless to say, the manner of the deaths has caused intense anguish to both
families. Jo tries to deal with it by saying Harry was no longer the son
they’d known: “He was unrecognisable.”
She believes that he was consuming “a cocktail of drugs” and that “drugs
paraphernalia” were found at the house. Friends believe Harry had been a
consistent user of cannabis, and that he and Mandy took ecstasy – which
helped relieve her symptoms – but nothing else. But was there a suicide
pact? The evidence is against it. Harry did tell people, including the local
postmistress, that when Mandy died he intended “to go too”. But once when he
said that in front of Mandy, she scoffed at the idea. Besides, his frenzied
attack was clearly no suicide pact.
Harry’s sister Kay suggests he had planned to kill both Mandy and himself with
her painkillers, but when the attempt failed and he woke, he decided to
finish the job. But the postmortem found no traces of painkillers in Harry’s
body. George is adamant that his daughter was murdered, and points to
defensive wounds on her arms as evidence of her terror. The ferocity of the
attack clearly speaks of a cataclysmic anger: his friends are perplexed that
Harry managed to continue mutilating himself after 30 or 40 cuts failed to
deliver a coup de grâce.
So what can have fuelled that rage? Was it the aggregate of everything that
made him angry, from the alleged meanness of publishers to the fate that
deemed he should watch his beloved wife die? If that is not enough to
explain the scale of his anger, further clues may be disinterred from the
conflicts between the accounts of his life related by Harry and his mother.
In contrast to the idyllic version Jo presented, Harry gave glimpses of a
very different story. In 2003 he told Vicky Allan of the Glasgow Sunday
Herald about a “traumatic childhood”, including beatings and deprivations at
school. His journals confirm that he hated being sent away and hated his
school. To Allan, he gave a further detail: his mother had left his father
when he was three, returning when he was seven. “It was just a lot of
breaking up and coming back together,” he said. He added that his mother was
“a bit like Stalin, in that she rewrites history”.
There were assertions in several obituaries, including one by his agent
Caroline Sheldon, that Harry’s parents had “separated” when he was two. As
we neared the end of our interview with Jo it was she who raised this issue,
claiming that accounts that she and her husband had separated were a
mistake. She embraced Derek, who had returned from his golf club, saying:
“We’ve never been separated and I love him to death.” Yet in separate
telephone interviews, their daughter Kay – who lives in the US – confirms
Harry’s account that his parents had separated more than once: “My mother
left my father several times. They made up their differences. They’re where
they are now and they’re happy together.”
By itself, her parents’ separation need not have proved particularly harmful.
But the damage was aggravated, according to Kay, by her mother insisting
that nothing of the kind had occurred. Kay confirms it was this denial, more
than the separation, that so angered her brother. “He used to harp on about
it. He was very upset Mum had left, and it came out in his interviews. I
pointed out to Mum and Dad that you can’t rewrite things that have been put
in place by Richard, otherwise it makes him look like a liar.” Harry used to
call Kay and plead with her to help persuade their parents to admit the
truth. But Kay told him to “let it go”.
It is well established that the damage suffered by victims of psychological
trauma is liable to be intensified if they also find their experiences are
denied, above all by the person who caused the hurt. Harry had always felt
ambivalent towards his parents, writing them out of history yet calling on
them when he needed them, while Jo attempted to compensate for her perceived
failings by showing love and support. In the end, it can be argued, Harry’s
struggle to reconcile these contradictions became too much, and he tried to
resolve them by cutting off from his family, even attempting to replace them
with Mandy’s.
It can also be argued that his struggle with his feelings of abandonment and
betrayal ran in tandem with the search for his own identity, reflected in
the new beginning he created for himself in Edinburgh. There, he found his
skill in acting out a range of roles entertained his friends and brought him
rewards. But in Shetland he was on a less forgiving stage; one where, as
Paul Bloomer remarked, “celebrity means nothing” and you have to confront
who you are – another battle he ultimately lost.
Of course, his failures may not have proved so catastrophic had he not also
had to watch the slow death of his beloved wife, partner in his fairy-tale
marriage. For a man already struggling with demons, it was the ultimate
disaster, tipping him into what can only be described as madness, so that he
killed the person he loved the most, leaving no other recourse than to turn
his knife upon himself. The ferocity of his attacks spoke of an anger and
hatred that could only be assuaged through death.
