Girl in a Box: A box sits on the platform, awaiting the Chicago-bound train. It’s giving off an oppressive odor, a hint to what’s inside.
My Father, the Serial Killer: As a boy, Matt learned that his dad had once shot a man by accidental. He could forgive that. He could not forgive what followed.
Hell House: He was an innocent child, betrayed by the system, abused to death by a truly evil woman who called herself his grandmother.
Death by Jacuzzi: According to Frank, his wife had drowned in their hot tub. If you’re going to lie to the police, it’s the small details that count.
No Way Out: A man is found dead inside a locked room, baffling even the NYPD’s best detectives. How did the killer enter? And how did he leave?
To Catch a Killer: A woman is butchered in her apartment. Then detectives make a startling discovery. Her neighbor is a suspect in a very similar crime.
A Dangerous Woman: She was a raven-haired beauty, an object of desire for every man she met. She was also selfish, manipulative...and a killer.
Murder Most Vile Volume 48
You're Not Well, Mr. Blackwell
And by 2004, that dream was well and truly alive. The family was now living in Melling, an affluent village in Merseyside, England. Brian was 18 years old and had just sat his A-level exams at Liverpool College, another private school. No one was in any doubt that his results would be exceptional, A grades across the board. Already he’d received a provisional acceptance to study medicine at Nottingham University. His new girlfriend, Amal Saba, was also going to Nottingham. Amal was the daughter of two distinguished Jordanian physicians. She planned on following her parents into the medical profession.
If all of this sounds somewhat utopian to you, that’s because it was. Brian Blackwell’s path through life had been mapped. He was on a one-way trajectory to the top. Ahead of him lay wealth and renown, success in his chosen career, marriage to a beautiful woman, gifted children to continue his legacy. For most of us, the promise of such a gilded future would be the stuff of daydreams. To Brian Blackwell, it fell short.
That is because Brian was a young man plagued by the curse of perfectionism, a man who had to excel at everything, the King Midas of ability. Such a thing is impossible, of course, even for the most talented among us. We’re good at some things, mediocre at some, downright poor at others. We learn to choose our battles. But you’d never be able to convince Brian of that. He had to be at the top of the heap, no matter the field. And so, Brian started to fill in the gaps where reality did not quite match up to his desired outcome. He invented a fantasy world, a magical kingdom in which he was the lord of all he surveyed.
Take tennis, for example. Brian was good at the game, definitely good enough to blow away most of the weekend hacks at his local club. In the greater scheme of things, though, he was okay, no more, no less. Certainly, he was never going to make it to center court at Wimbledon. Novak Djokovic was never going to be looking back at him from the other side of the net.
Only, that wasn’t good enough for Brian. He enjoyed playing tennis and since he enjoyed it, he had to be the best at it. So, Brian made up a story. He told his impressionable new girlfriend that he was the number one rated junior player in Britain, had just received a wildcard entry to the French Open, and had signed a sponsorship deal with Nike, worth £70,000 a year. He explained to her that he needed a manager and asked if she’d take the job at a generous salary. Amal, of course, accepted, especially when Brian waved a check for £39,000 under her nose.
That check, unsurprisingly, bounced the minute it hit Amal’s bank. At the time that Brian wrote it, he had less than £1 in his account. But he was quick to recover when she queried him about it. He said that there was some delay with the sponsorship money and offered to make it up to her by buying her a new car. Then, to finance the transaction, he cashed in a £9,000 bond that his father had set up for his education. Sydney was outraged when the bank informed him of the withdrawal. He demanded that Brian return the Ford Ka to the dealership for a refund. Brian explained that it wasn’t possible, at least not without taking a substantial loss. He then persuaded his father to let Amal keep the car, saying that her family would pay him back. It was another lie. Brian had no plans to ever discuss the matter with his girlfriend.
But he did have a new scheme to raise the money required to fund his fantasy. He started applying for bank loans and credit cards, forging his parent’s names as co-signatories. Jacqueline Blackwell found out about this in June 2004 and then had to contact various banks, canceling the cards. Not that this upset Brian’s plans too much. On July 24, 2004, he booked two first-class tickets from Manchester to New York. Then he called Amal and told her to pack a bag. They were going on a promotional visit to the United States, first-class all the way, paid for by his sponsor, Nike.
But this deceit also would be uncovered and this time with tragic results. On July 25, Sydney Blackwell took his wife to dinner, arriving home to find Brian in his room, hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture. Father and son then convened to the living room, where Sydney poured himself a whisky and eased into an armchair. Jacqueline was in the kitchen when she heard the pitch of their voices change, from the normal timbre of conversation to the more strained tones of conflict. Then she heard a loud ‘thwack’ and heard her husband grunt. Terrified, she picked a knife from the rack and entered the living room, holding the blade in front of her in a protective gesture. What she saw there was beyond the worst nightmare she could imagine. Sydney was sitting in the easy chair. Brian was standing behind him, raining down blows on his father’s head with a hammer.
When it was already too late, Jacqueline tried to run. She’d covered only a few steps when her son caught up with her, wrenched the knife from her grasp, and started plunging it repeatedly into her chest, inflicting at least 30 deep wounds. Jacqueline was butchered right there in the hall. Brian then dragged her corpse into the bathroom, where he left her, face down on the tile. He then returned to his father who was terribly injured but not yet dead. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he whispered as he plunged the knife into his father’s heart.
The father who had sired him, the mother who had birthed him, the parents who had coddled and indulged him all his life, were dead, butchered by his own hand. But Brian Blackwell wasn’t going to let that derail his US vacation. He and Amal flew to New York the very next day, checking into the presidential suite at the Plaza, where they stayed three nights and ran up a bill of £2,200, paid for on his dead father’s credit card. They then traveled to Miami, then to San Francisco and Barbados. By the time they returned to the UK on August 12, the card had racked up expenses totaling £30,000. Here, Brian cooked up another lie. He told Amal’s parents that his mom and dad had gone to Majorca for a holiday and had forgotten to leave him the house keys. Could he stay a week or two? They, of course, said yes. How could they refuse this impressive young man who they hoped to one day have as a son-in-law?
On August 19, one week after he returned from the United States, Brian Blackwell received his A-level results. As expected, he had recorded distinctions across the board, in mathematics, biology, chemistry, and Spanish. With that, his provisional acceptance to Nottingham University was made official. He was due to begin classes in October. Amal had also been accepted. Everything, it seemed, was right with the world.
But, of course, everything wasn’t right. In a bungalow just a few miles away, two butchered corpses lay undiscovered. No one had yet raised any alarms since the Blackwells often took short trips to Spain on the spur of the moment. It was thought that they’d done so again. The façade, though, could not hold indefinitely.
On September 5, a neighbor was passing by the Blackwell house when she noticed a particularly noxious odor emanating from the property. The stink only intensified as she approached the front door. And there was something ominous about it, ominous enough for her to notify the police. The officers who responded to the call knew that stench immediately. It was the unmistakable reek of putrefaction. Sydney Blackwell was found seated in his armchair in the living room, still clutching his spectacles. Jacqueline was in the bathroom, lying face down. The post-mortem examination revealed that they had been killed in the latter weeks of July.
Brought in for questioning by the police, Brian Blackwell initially pled innocence, claiming that his parents had been alive and well when he’d departed for New York. However, the questions became far more pressing once it was discovered that he had run up massive debt on his father’s credit card. Eventually, Brian could no longer sustain the pretense and admitted that it was he who had bludgeoned and stabbed his parents to death. His arrest came as a massive shock to Amal Saba and her family. Like everyone else who Brian Blackwell encountered, they were taken in by his lies.
Despite his admission of guilt, though, Brian Blackwell pled not guilty to murder when he appeared at the Liverpool Crown Court in June 2005. He admitted instead to manslaughter, with his counsel citing narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) as a mitigating factor. People with this condition typically have a vastly inflated opinion of their own brilliance. They believe that they are entitled to success in every aspect of their lives. Any threat to this belief system can throw them into a rage and they may turn violent if challenged.
This is probably what happened at the Blackwell residence that night. Most likely, Sydney sat his son down and informed him that he had uncovered the fraud on his credit card and was going to contact the airline in the morning to cancel the tickets. That would have thrown Brian into a panic. His carefully constructed fantasy was falling apart. Amal would know that he’d lied to her. He would be exposed for the loser he was.
But not if he could circumvent the evidence of his deception, not if he could eliminate those who sought to undermine him. Brian still had the hammer in his hand from hanging the picture. He used it now to attack his father, clubbing him from behind as he sat in his chair. Then Jacqueline came to investigate the ruckus and was met with the full fury of her son’s homicidal rage.
This was how investigators interpreted the evidence. Brian would neither confirm nor deny their theory. He claimed that he had blacked out during the attack. However, he did read out a statement in court, tearfully expressing remorse for what he’d done and saying that he missed his parents and would forever be haunted by causing their deaths.
The NPD defense had succeeded. Brian Blackwell was acquitted of murder and convicted, instead, of manslaughter. However, this would turn out to be a double-edged sword for the killer. Five psychiatrists testified at the trial and all of them said essentially the same thing. Blackwell was afflicted with NPD and NPD was untreatable. It would always be the driving force of his personality. That gave Justice Royce few options when it came to sentencing. He passed down a life term and offered the opinion that the defendant should never be released since he would always be a threat to society. As prosecutor David Steer had offered during the proceedings, “Brian Blackwell is a very sick man.”
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