Monday evening in September 2006, and two middle-aged men – neighbours,
colleagues, friends – are having a pint at their local pub. They had walked
down West Street to the Castle after a dinner to mark the start of the new
term at the school where they worked. Both men were eminent in their
profession, senior members of staff at one of the world’s most prestigious
private schools, Harrow.
Jason Braham, Harrow School’s head of art, had arrived in January 1983. Now in
his mid-fifties, he’d been thinking of taking early retirement so he and his
wife, Julienne, could move to Wales to a cottage their daughter Lucy had
scouted for them, where they could find the time and space to make their own
art – Jason his pottery and Julienne her paintings. He had discussed his
retirement plans with the headmaster, Barnaby Lenon, but had more or less
decided to carry on until he was 60, to give them time to establish the home
in Wales and to wait until Lucy was living independently.
Alan Jaggs, head of design and technology, was already at Harrow when Braham
arrived. He had a well-equipped department and often supported Braham’s art
endeavours. They lived with their respective families four doors apart on
Peterborough Road.
The school dominated and entwined the two men’s lives. Theirs was not a
working day that ever really ended. The teachers, some 90 people among a
staff of 400, were effectively on call around the clock and expected to
perform numerous extracurricular duties. Many actually lived in the boarding
houses where all the boys resided. Others, such as Braham and Jaggs, had
these impossibly comfortable homes that no teaching salary, not even
Harrow’s, could ever ordinarily allow them. The Brahams had once stayed at
the Jaggses’ former holiday home in Spain, though not with the Jaggses, and
the Jaggses had once stayed at the Brahams’ holiday home in Wales, though,
again, not with their hosts. Braham would later struggle to remember what
they had talked about that night at the Castle. Grumbling about their
headmaster perhaps, or the minutiae of football or fishing, two of Jaggs’s
interests.
One thing they certainly did not discuss – had never discussed, and now
probably never would – was the troubling conduct of Jaggs’s 22-year-old
son, William, himself a former pupil at Harrow – an Old Harrovian – who had
been sent down from Oxford a year earlier. He was due to retake his exam
within a week or so, in the hope of being readmitted. Braham knew how proud
Jaggs had been of his son winning a place at Oriel College. But theirs was
not the kind of friendship, or they were not the kind of men, for the
sharing of intimacies, and Braham implicitly understood that William Jaggs
and his alleged drug-taking and his increasingly aberrant behaviour were not
to be mentioned. Alan Jaggs never ever brought it up. Braham privately
wondered if Will, as he was known, was having a breakdown. As someone else
later said to him, lots of people had noticed signs of troubled behaviour,
but nobody realised how psychotic he had become. That was the terrible thing
they would all have to live with.
Will Jaggs must have been somewhere nearby that night, wrestling with his
demons. He was hearing screams and voices, shouting loudly and angrily at
him from inside his head.
Three days later, on September 14, 2006, Braham and his wife, Julienne, went
to Hampstead for the evening to see an exhibition of sculpture, and decided
to stay on for dinner. Lucy, a 25-year-old fashion designer, was alone back
at the house, working on some drawings.
A neighbour, also part of the school community, heard noises next door and at
first thought it was a domestic argument and didn’t like to intervene. The
noises continued and became more disturbing. The police were eventually
called and smashed their way in through the back of the house. Inside they
found that Jason Braham’s daughter Lucy had been stabbed and killed by Alan
Jaggs’s son William. Unlike their parents, Lucy and the young man who had
come to kill her barely knew each other. As the police arrived, William, who
was naked, was repeatedly stabbing himself.
The officers thought he wouldn’t survive and managed to obtain what they
anticipated would be a dying confession. Were you responsible for the
injuries to this girl? Yes. It was the last time for months that William
would admit anything.
) ) ) ) )
Harrow School is not an easy establishment for outsiders to enter or
understand. Today there are 800 pupils, and during this last year they each,
or most of them, paid £26,445 for the privilege.
Pupils start at the school when they are 13. They’re known as “shells” until
the second year, when they are “removed from under the shell” and so become
“removes”. Shells are looked after by an older pupil, a “shepherd”, when
they arrive, to prepare them for the new boys’ test after three weeks, when
they will be expected to know the names and colours of all the houses and
the school’s slang. If you fail you get “double” – a punishment (the word is
derived from lines written out on special “double” paper).
All pupils must keep their shoes polished and their Harrow hats – which look
like boaters – in good condition. Their trousers are “greyers”; their
blazers are “bluers”. On Sundays they wear pinstripe trousers and
tail-coats. If they are sick they will see “mates” – matron – and if they’re
naughty they may end up being “rusticated” – suspended. A bath or shower is
a “tosh”; “flicks” is lights out. There are many traditions, such as the
annual cricket match against Harrow’s rival in the top public-school stakes,
Eton. And just as Eton has its “boating song”, so Harrow has its own
repertoire of songs, such as Forty Years On.
Winston Churchill is just one of seven British prime ministers educated at
Harrow. The playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Terence Rattigan both
went there. More recent celebrated old boys include Patrick Lichfield,
Richard Curtis and James Blunt.
William Jaggs began his time at Harrow with a reputation as the cleverest boy
in his year. Some who knew him would say it was only after he left the
school that his problems really began. At Harrow he could be pleasant and
charming. He liked to play chess. He did not seem “weird” – just a bit
theatrical and eccentric. But in reality, the warning signs were there from
an early age. When he was 15 he allegedly sexually assaulted a fellow
boarder, a younger boy, just 13, forcing him to participate in oral sex. The
boy complained to the school but, I was told, his parents didn’t want to
make a fuss. The police were not informed, the matter was dealt with
internally, quietly, and William was not expelled nor even invited to
withdraw – a handy euphemism sometimes to avoid the humiliation of
expulsion. His family was merely told he would no longer be allowed to board
and would have to live with his parents instead.
The pupil sons of staff liked to board, I was told, because it was more fun
and because they didn’t want to be the odd ones out. Barnaby Lenon became
head in 2000, as William was starting sixth form. He did not know about the
alleged assault until after Lucy’s death, and would not comment on how it
had been handled by his predecessor. I was told William began a course of
counselling after the incident, but the course was not completed. I
approached Alan and Stella Jaggs with a request for an interview through
their son’s solicitor but never heard back from him.
William would later say he had some mutual sexual contact with fellow pupils
of the same age around this time. And by his own admission he began taking
drugs at 16, smoking dope and using cocaine. He also started what would
become a string of short-lived relationships with young women. The following
year, aged 17, he had a relationship with a woman of 23. She was so old she
seemed like his mother, he told a psychiatrist later. When she went to the
US, he felt rejected and began drinking. It was the start of his depression.
When they finally read the psychiatric reports, the police noted the theme
of rejection and the brevity of all his relationships. As one policeman put
it, “When they found out what he was like, they binned him.”
) ) ) ) )
William left Harrow in 2002 with As in English and biology and a B in
computers – not exactly living up to his reputation for academic brilliance.
Just before going to Oxford he had a three-week relationship with Zoe, the
daughter of another of his father’s colleagues, Rob Collins. He was by his
own account worried about Oxford, so much so that he “freaked out” about it,
had panic attacks and began thinking about death, reading Nietzsche, and The
Outsider by Albert Camus. When he started at Oxford he was still troubled
and went to see a GP, who noted that he was “narcissistic, arrogant and
manipulative”, just how many people saw him.
He had a new friend back in Harrow, Simon MacPherson, the son of the school’s
classics master, who had been a pupil at Eton but had left to go to Harrow.
There is some uncertainty as to why he left Eton. But the word filtered back
from a former Harrow master now at Eton that MacPherson was suspected of
drug-taking. The rumour did not reach the head of Harrow School, however, as
he told me – a shame, given the school’s zero-tolerance towards drug-taking
among its pupils. MacPherson and Jaggs, pupil and ex-pupil, certainly began
taking drugs together. But William was jealous when he came back from Oxford
at Christmas and found that Zoe was dating MacPherson, especially when he
saw them kissing. When he returned again at Easter he was “very jealous”,
but that does not seem to have overly interfered with his shared pursuit of
drugs with MacPherson.
William completed his first year at Oxford, taking stimulants and
antidepressants to help him study. He just passed the end-of-year exams
before returning to Harrow for the summer.
Not long after he killed Lucy, a story about William – “My Terror of the
Harrow Knife Killer” – appeared in The Mail on Sunday. This was Michelle
Venis, a woman from the town, a heroin addict and shoplifter, who described
taking crack with William and MacPherson. She explained that she had stayed
at the home of MacPherson’s parents – two doors away from the Brahams – that
summer, while his parents were away: “We were smoking crack and there was a
big grand piano, antique vases and all these books and a posh school uniform
hanging up.
I remember thinking that if this boy’s parents could see what we were doing in
their house, they’d have a fit.” Venis was staying there with her
boyfriend’s uncle, a convicted armed robber. She left when she heard that
William had suggested to MacPherson that they rape her. “He was very quiet
and would just sit there staring at you. It was really unnerving.” This
newspaper story sent a second wave of shock through the school community
when it appeared after the murder. Two worlds had collided. On the
grapevine, people heard the uncle had just come out of prison after serving
time for GBH. How did he end up inside the school community?
William later claimed that he was taking much more than crack during this
period – ecstasy, cocaine, mushrooms, cannabis – all with
MacPherson. He was also drinking heavily and found it hard to concentrate
when he returned to Oxford. There was another relationship with a woman at
Oxford, but that too ended after three weeks.
By January 2005, William was back in Harrow and “feeling outraged”, he later
told a psychiatrist, at his rejections from women. He was resentful towards
MacPherson, and vengefully told MacPherson’s new girlfriend that MacPherson
was still having sex and taking drugs with his old girlfriend. William is
then alleged to have set fire to MacPherson’s car. It was hard to get facts
on this; it doesn’t seem to have been reported to the police. This was
another incident that never reached the ears of Harrow’s headmaster.
William said from this period onwards he was smoking skunk and taking
methylphenidate, an antidepressant used to treat attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He went back to Oxford and started a new
relationship. He gained the woman’s consent to tie her up for sex, but when
he did she cried, so he left and the relationship ended. He began following
her around Oxford, like a stalker. He began having auditory hallucinations –
hearing voices. He produced a knife at a party while he was drunk, and
visited a prostitute back in Harrow.
In recent years Harrow School has been marketing its brand, opening two
schools in its name in Asia and developing the work of Harrow School
Enterprises Ltd (HSEL), with a focus on summer schools for outsiders, using
young people from the school community as staff. Jaggs and MacPherson took
part as staff during the summers of 2005 and 2006. They were suspected of
drug-taking and of stealing. In the worst incident, MacPherson was entrusted
with £2,000 to bank downtown. He returned saying he’d been mugged and the
money was gone. He was suspected of stealing it and the police were called.
His room was searched and “drug paraphernalia” was found, including,
allegedly, a set of scales you might use if you were dealing in drugs. He
was expelled.
William failed his second-year exams at Oxford and was sent down for a year
with the chance to retake them. But he was becoming increasingly removed
from reality. In April 2006 he was in two performances of the Harrow School
players’ production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Lenon saw the first night’s
show and saw nothing strange, but to others Jaggs’s over-the-top, shrieking
portrayal was a sign of something seriously wrong. The next night he went
mute in the middle of the play, and at the after-show party he slapped
MacPherson and threatened to stab another man who intervened when he was
harassing a young woman.
He described some of his internal mayhem in an e-mail to his Oxford tutor, Dr
Glenn Black, which he sent the day before he killed Lucy.
He was descending into what would shortly be diagnosed as schizophrenia. He
could hear people having sex at houses on the Hill. “By now I was starting
to put two and two together. Sixty bats had suddenly taken up residence in
the window frame of my bedroom and would fly around our Victorian manor at
night.”
One night he sat in the Castle talking in French. What once seemed like
harmless eccentricities now seemed disturbing. William had always enjoyed
showing off his wit, but now seemed to enjoy messing with people’s heads, as
if to disconcert them and make fun of them. What were his parents thinking
or doing? His younger brother, James, by all accounts a kind, stable young
man, was also reportedly at his wits’ end and was desperate to help.
There was another, older man who hung around with William and MacPherson and
was suspected of taking drugs with them and of being a malign influence on
William. Jason Braham thought of MacPherson as a serpent and later called
this other man a “pornographer”. The man has since left the Harrow area, but
one night in the Castle before he went away, William tried to strangle him,
and was banned from the pub.
Jason Braham had left some pupils’ exam work of large canvas paintings on
exhibition in the art department. While he was away on a school trip,
someone got in and slashed the paintings with a knife. Braham thought: “This
isn’t just vandalism, this is someone who’s got a serious mental problem.”
The police were notified after more thefts from that year’s summer school and
further acts of vandalism, though again there does not seem to have been a
formal investigation. The head of HSEL went to see the head to complain
about William. Lenon says this is the only time anyone made a direct
complaint to him about William. Another adult involved with the school
invested some energy in trying to find proof of Jaggs and MacPherson’s
drug-taking, so that some action could be taken. He even scrabbled around in
some bushes where he’d heard the two young men had been seen, but there were
no clues to be found. Still, William was asked to leave the summer school
and his parents took him to Devon, to get him away and perhaps in the hope
that he would focus on his studies, with the Oxford exam to retake.
In the e-mail to his tutor, William said he spent a lot of time copying out
extracts from the works he was supposed to be studying. After 20 pages of
scribbles, a change occurred. “I found myself tuned to a higher level of
auditory hallucinations. Language had no meaning for me as I now considered
it a lie.” He heard screams, which became louder when he returned home.
There was loud screaming of sex taking place. “I should add that it turned
me on.”
According to William, he took a chainsaw from his parents’ home some days
before Lucy’s death and went to find MacPherson and kill him. He was only
prevented from gaining access to MacPherson’s parents’ home by a change to
the key-code. He said he told Zoe to warn MacPherson. He had earlier sent
her a text: “I’m seeing a shrink today – as you correctly noted I’m a total
psychopath. Have a nice day.” That was a lie, or half one, as he was not
seeing a shrink at all.
According to MacPherson he had begun to distance himself from William in the
months before Lucy’s death. He cannot have seen much of William while he was
in Devon, but there is evidence that they were still hanging around
together, taking drugs.
One day, Alice Braham was visiting her sister Lucy and heard the conversation
of two men walking past, the words “shag her senseless on the kitchen floor”
distinguishing themselves. Alice was shocked and went to look out of the
window, but Lucy said: “Don’t bother looking, it’s just Jaggs and
MacPherson.” When I asked him about it, MacPherson said it wasn’t him.
On September 13, Jaggs sat down to write the long e-mail to his tutor at
Oriel, in which he outlined the full measure of his psychosis and his
murderous intent. “Dear Glenn, I must apologise if this message is
unexpected,” he began. “I must also apologise for the length…” It ended:
“Glenn, this is a paranoid delusional nightmare brought on by the use of
drugs. Otherwise I am in good health and hope you are too.”
The Jaggses’ family cat had given birth to kittens. Alan Jaggs apparently
suggested to his son that he could give or sell the kittens to their
neighbours. William had taken no medication that day, or any drugs, he said.
There were no voices, not to begin with. He went out into the street and saw
Lucy and asked her if she’d like a kitten, but she said she could not look
after it. When he went home, William heard a voice telling him to make sure
she took a kitten, so he went to her house and handed one to her and walked
away before she could give it back.
After a few minutes she called his home to say she was bringing the kitten
back. He went out and met her in the street and took the kitten. She said
the kitten had enjoyed a fun adventure, but William felt rejected and
unhappy. He went home and felt angry at Lucy. He decided to go back and
force himself into the house as a game to show the kitten around. She was
smiling when she opened the door and he tried to charm her. But, he said, as
he went into the house the kitten was becoming irrelevant.
He tried to kill himself afterwards, he said, so that they could both die and
be together.
) ) ) ) )
Four weeks after the murder, a team of inspectors from the Independent Schools
Inspectorate began a four-day examination of Harrow. Their report made
special mention of the school’s excellent pastoral care but failed to
mention that a former pupil, the son of a head of department, had killed
another member of the school’s community on school premises a month earlier.
Even Jason Braham concedes that the school makes great efforts to care for the
pupils. But what about the staff and their families? Why had nobody put two
and two together and realised Jaggs was ill? Why hadn’t his parents
expressed concern about him? Why did Lucy have to die?
Alan Jaggs continued teaching at the school. As far as the Brahams knew, he
had never offered to resign. He had sent them a “nice” note – not an e-mail,
as was reported at the time – expressing his regrets about what had
happened. “It was nice of him to do that,” said Jason.
Jason said he never really felt angry towards the parents of his daughter’s
killer, though he thought they were naive. “No, I felt bad for them actually
because, you know, the last thing… They wouldn’t have wanted to hurt Lucy,
or hurt us, and they would have been… It must have been shattering for them,
I should think.” Jason’s wife, Julienne, invited Alan’s wife, Stella, round
for coffee – not to talk about the murder but just to see how they were
coping.
Jason soon realised that to go back to school would have been to carry on as
if nothing had happened, which would have been impossible. So he left, while
Jaggs stayed on.
During my recent interview with the head, Barnaby Lenon, I said how strange it
looked that the father of the killer remained at the school while the father
of the victim had felt obliged to leave. Had Jaggs never come to him and
offered to go instead? The head would not tell me what had been discussed
between him and Jaggs. He said Jaggs, while longer-serving than Braham, was
actually younger and not yet ready to think about retiring, whereas he
thought Braham had already decided to go anyway, before Lucy was killed.
Even though we talked for many hours, I don’t think Braham was ever sure he
wanted the article to appear. There were certainly things he wanted to say,
warnings he wanted to give that might save others. He was concerned not to
come across as bitter, anxious to convey that he did not feel angry, though
in truth I suspect he felt very angry indeed. He said there was a lot of
denial about Jaggs’s behaviour. I think he was right, but perhaps he too was
reluctant to admit just how angry he really was.
He certainly believed, at the time of her death, that the school had failed
his daughter. But he also, I think, was being torn apart by grief and
distress on the one hand and, on the other, the same loyalty to the school
and its community that everyone else involved seems to feel. This was a
private world that, if not exactly secretive, was certainly not a place to
put its dirty linen on public display. The police were surprised the case
didn’t receive more attention. As one officer said to me, they thought this
could be the case to blow the lid off that private world.
Jason Braham spoke movingly about the contrast between Lucy – “our lovely,
funny, creative, principled daughter” – and the young man who tore her from
them, “the selfish act of a depraved, woefully immature young man in the
grip of, it seems, schizophrenia”.
Some four psychiatric experts examined William and all reached the same
conclusion, which meant he couldn’t be convicted of murder but of
manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He’d go to
Broadmoor as a patient rather than to jail as a prisoner.
William told the psychiatrists the knife had been a substitute for his
erection and, to the police officers in the case, this suggested a condition
known as picarism, in which the perpetrator derives sexual pleasure from
stabbing his victims with sharp objects. It went along with the themes of
rejection and inadequacy.
For Braham, William’s crime was all the worse because of the elite world he
had been born into. “Over-privileged and self-satisfied drug-users are the
more contemptible than those born into disadvantage.” He blamed too the
“drugs-taking fraternity at Oxford”, which he also saw as encouraging
William.
His tutor would not comment on the case except to say that he had forwarded
William’s e-mail to the college provost, who had passed it on to the
police. It arrived too late. I was told that many people at the school
wondered why William’s parents had been unable to seek help for their son.
Did they perhaps feel they would be judged or shamed by the admission that
help was needed or that their son was sick?
Lenon told me the school has now changed its policies to make it clear that
medical resources, including a newly appointed psychologist, are there for
staff and families who need them. He was keen to stress the school’s zero
tolerance towards drugs and its reputation for pastoral care. He thought I
ought to study schizophrenia and pointed out how difficult it was to
diagnose.
He was right, of course. All those things were true, but I also noted how
little he knew of the events at the school that preceded the killing. There
was little police involvement or investigation of the incidents of stealing
and vandalism that might have led to action and could have disclosed a
troubled psyche. It is, however, easy to be wise with hindsight.
In the meantime, Jason Braham was left wondering whether William’s illness was
induced by his drug-taking or if the drug-taking was a symptom of his
psychotic illness. Braham read up all he could on the proven link between
the use of cannabis and marijuana and the onset of psychosis. The experts
said that William’s schizophrenia had probably been developing in him since
he was 14 or 15, which was around the time he started taking drugs. There is
certainly good medical evidence that some drugs, including amphetamines,
cocaine and cannabis, heighten and increase the schizophrenic’s experience
of hallucinations.
William’s condition was said by his lawyer to have improved dramatically once
he was in Broadmoor and being properly treated. He was said to have become
suicidal all over again when the enormity of his offence hit home. He wished
he could apologise to Braham. When I told Braham this, he said he hoped he
would have the grace to accept William’s apology when it came. He knew being
forgiving was supposed to help, but for the most part he just felt pity for
William. Pity, and a lot of contempt.
