In an exclusive interview with the Jersey Evening Post, Jersey Murders Aunt Nan Clark
appeals for the release of Roderick Newall on the 10th anniversary of the brutal murder
of his parents, Elizabeth and Nicholas. Jeremy Josephs, author of Murder in the
Family, the inside story of the Jersey murders, reports:
The main Web site of freelance writer
Jeremy Josephs is at www.jeremyjosephs.com Please check there if you might be interested in
engaging him as a writer. Many of his articles are available online. Please
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This week is the tenth anniversary of the
notorious Newall murder case - the true life Bergerac double murder mystery
which gripped both the islanders of Jersey and the whole of the country for a
good many years. Ten years since dashing ex-army officer Roderick Newall
brutally beat his parents to death with a Chinese rice-flail, lacerating their
skulls and drenching Elizabeth and Nicholas Newall’s Jersey bungalow in blood.
And yet Roderick’s aunt Nan Clark, who now lives in Spain with her retired
physician husband Alister, has used the grim occasion as an opportunity to appeal
to the Jersey authorities to release the nephew she once doted upon as a small
boy.
"I think that his punishment is learning
to live with his actions", she told the Post this week. "I do not
think that keeping him in prison benefits any one. Keeping him locked up and
institutionalizing him is simply paying lip service to an ideal of crime and
punishment. Destroying another life, especially for someone who has so much to
offer, is not justice. Nor is it what his mother would have wanted."
It was on 10th October 1987 that
Roderick, a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and an officer
in the elite Royal Green Jackets, invited his parents out to dinner at the
stylish Sea Crest Hotel in Jersey. Brother Mark, a city bond-dealer, had also
flown in from London to join in the celebrations - it was their mother
Elizabeth’s 48th birthday. Elizabeth Newall order lobster. Her
husband Nicholas drank champagne, the well-to-do couple entirely unaware that
they were eating their last supper. If matters had rested there the Newall case
might not have caught the public’s imagination in the way that it did. But it
took the Jersey police, more used to dealing with shop-lifters and drunks, the
best part of five years to bring charges against Roderick, the prime suspect in
the case. He was eventually tricked into a tape recorded confession by his
uncle in a hotel room in Scotland.
"Then there was shock and
disbelief", Nan Clark said this week from her home on the Costa Brava in
Spain. "But now there is anger. Anger that I have been deprived of two
people I loved. No sister to laugh with. No brother in law whose historical
research used to stretch all of our minds. It damaged our health, destroyed my
husband’s career and pushed all of us to the edge."
In the aftermath of the Jersey murders it did
not take too long before the tongues of islanders began to wag. It was said
that the Newalls were remote and uncaring parents whose love for one another
was so great that it tended to exclude their two sons, who were sent off to
boarding school in England at the age of 7. But these accusations are angrily
rejected by Nan Clark, who describes her sister and brother in law as normal
and loving parents in every way.
"Why else would Elizabeth and Nicholas
have introduced them to skiing, surfing, scuba diving, sailing and so on? These
were not the acts of uncaring parents. And Nicholas in particular cared deeply
about his sons’ education, sending them off to Radley College, one of the
finest public schools in the land. I often looked after the boys when they were
little. And as teenagers too. Look at the pictures - they were absolutely
gorgeous and adorable in every way."
As young boys the Roderick and Mark would
regularly make their way either to Scotland or Southend, where the Clarks then
lived, often travelling unaccompanied, in order to join their aunt and uncle
during the school holidays. On other occasions Nan would fly out herself to
Jersey in order to care for her nephews, invariably assited by the Newalls’
nanny, while Elizabeth and Nicholas were away on holiday à deux.
It was never a hardship for her to do so because the boys, although sometimes a
handful, were a pleasure to be with.
But Angela Barnes, a Jersey millionaire who
befriended the Newalls from the moment of their arrival on the island back in
the sixties, says that the Clarks were oblivious to an undercurrent of tension
within the immediate family, and that the murders were deeds waiting to be
done. "It was just a matter of time" she says. "If you ask me it
was the lack of love. I knew that Roderick had attacked his mother in the past.
I had seen the bitter rows and in-fighting for myself. Some of it had even
taken place within my own home. So when Elizabeth and Nicholas were murdered I
wasn’t in the least bit surprised."
Today Nan Clark is a leading light in the
ex-pat community, where she spends her time reading and playing bridge.
Intelligent, articulate and full of compassion, it had been her intention to
rebuild bridges with both of her nephews once the glare of the media spotlight
had subsided. She once went on record saying that she still considered both of
her nephews part of the family and that "you don’t stop loving them simply
because something awful like this has happened."
Time alone, however, has proved to be no
healer. Because today, on the tenth anniversary of the murders, she considers
that she too is a victim. "I had hoped that that we would in some way
return to a working relationship with Roderick and Mark. But I see now that
this is not possible. There are too many resentments, too many suspicions, real
or imagined." She is also angry at the judicial system of Jersey which was
unable or unwilling to disinherit either of the Newall boys. In the event
Roderick, who today continues to serve out his sentence in Jersey’s La Moye
prison, disinherited himself. But Mark, who received a six year sentence for
assisting Roderick in the aftermath of the murders and for misleading the
police in their inquiries, did indeed inherit his parents’ sizable estate. He
has since resumed his career in the world of high-finance.
"I wish I could say that these dreadful
events have improved me, taught me a lesson or made me more tolerant in some
way", Nan Clark concludes. "But instead I find I am less able to put
with petty squabbles, and peoples’ grievances. I have become more cynical and
less trusting. And on top of all that I feel guilty. Guilty that I should have
foreseen these awful events. Guilty that I there was something which I should
have done. And worst of all, I still don’t have an answer to the question why.
Why did Satan chose my family to create such a tragedy to alter
all of our lives? For Elizabeth and Nicholas, the tombstone consecrated at the
memorial service in Scotland expresses our final thoughts: ‘that hallowed
morn shall chase away the sorrows of the night’. For the rest of us,
alas, we are learning to live with the sorrows - and to accept that which we
cannot alter."
The main Web site of freelance writer Jeremy
Josephs is at www.jeremyjosephs.com Please check there if you might be interested in
engaging him as a writer.
Many of his articles are available online.
Please check the sitemap
for a complete list.