‘Missed chances’: agencies criticised over family murder

Carl Mills set fire to a recycling bin in the porch of the Buckley family’s house in Cwmbran, South Wales, on 18 September 2012, killing his own baby daughter. Kim Buckley, 46, her daughter Kayleigh, 17, and six month old granddaughter Kimberley, who was deaf and blind, died in the fire which engulfed their home. The judge at Mills’ trial said he had condemned the family to “an agonising death”.

Mills, who is currently serving a minimum term of 35 years for the murders, had a history of violence. However, processes for retrieving and sharing police information on him were “inadequate”, according to three reports published on Thursday, and there were repeated failures across agencies to understand the level of risk the family were being exposed to.

‘Grooming’

Kim Buckley first alerted the police to Mills at the end of 2010 when the 26-year-old man, originally from Bolton and described by his mother as a ‘loner’, began ‘grooming’ 15-year-old schoolgirl Kayleigh. He’d made contact with her and other schoolgirls through Facebook.

In total, Kim Buckley had 69 contacts with agencies concerning her daughter from the summer of 2009.

She repeatedly expressed concerns about Kayleigh’s relationship with Carl Mills. Mills, in turn, frequently threatened Kim Buckley, at one point saying he was going to ‘slaughter’ her son.

The Serious Case Review found, however, that Mill’s “predatory, controlling and abusive behaviour was not recognised and addressed by the agencies as sexual exploitation and domestic abuse”.

The approach various agencies took towards Kayleigh is also criticised. Social workers were found not to have understood the legal definition of a ‘child’. The review concluded that when Kayleigh turned 16, she was treated not as “a child at continuing risk of abuse” by an older man, but rather as a “young person making bad choices”.

No one, it seems, considered the possibility of any legal action to restrict Mills’ access to Kayleigh. Key opportunities were missed to trigger child protection processes.

Police disclosed to Kim Buckley in November 2010 that Mills posed a ‘significant risk’ to Kayleigh but – against a background of increasingly threatening behaviour by Mills – inadequate enquiries were made to fully examine his past behaviour.

Above: family friend Louise Davey says they had no idea about Carl Mills’ past

The review learnt that were “at least 45 incidents of violence committed by Mills in Bolton” which included setting fire to his own mother’s bed, threatening her with knives and assaulting her. Gwent Police, however, failed to obtain from other forces complete information about Mills’ previous convictions and the intelligence held on him.

In May 2012, after Kimberley was born prematurely (her twin was still born), the nature of Mills’ threats against Kayleigh and her mother was reported as “extreme”. At one point it was noted that Mills threatened to dig up the body of the twin who had died and then kill Kayleigh so that her surviving baby Kimberley “does not have her milk”.

Domestic abuse

Appropriate domestic abuse procedures, however, were not followed. A “lack of professional curiosity” was identified as a theme in the review. At the end of August 2012, a few weeks before the murders, Kim Buckley reported to police that Mills had cut all the electrical leads in her home, snapped the key to the electric meter and stolen her door keys.

Above: Torfaen County Borough Council’s Chief Officer for Social Services, Sue Evans

The police asked the housing association to change the locks at the home and instigated a ‘safety plan’. The domestic homicide review, however, states that Gwent Police should have treated this not as a criminal damage incident but in the context of domestic abuse, thus triggering appropriate risk assessments. The Independent Police Complaints Commission, in its report, says the level of service provided to the Buckley family “fell well below the standard they should have expected”.

At a press conference in Cwmbran, Simon Burch, chair of the South East Wales Safeguarding Children’s Board, apologised for failings identified in the reports: “These deaths in September 2012 were a tragedy from which service providers have learned and will strive to improve. We have used these reports to conduct investigations, learn from emerging issues and take action in response to the recommendations made in the report published today”.

In a written statement, Gwyneth Swain, the mother of Kim Buckley, said: “We want these reports to be used to stop anything like this ever happening again. Lessons must be learned from the many things that went wrong. Three members of my family should not have been killed by Mills. There were so many missed chances”.