Tensions between Epsom head and husband who 'killed her and daughter'

Did living in the shadow of his high achieving wife lead to unthinkable tragedy? Details emerge of the tensions behind the picture perfect lives of the Epsom College head and her husband who ‘killed her and their daughter before turning the gun on himself’

News that something terrible had happened at Epsom College began to spread among parents via WhatsApp groups last Sunday afternoon. Pupils arriving back from a trip spotted police cars and cordons around the head teacher’s house, and before long messages were pinging amid concerns about what was happening at the prestigious £45,000-a-year private school.

‘People were saying that somebody was hurt,’ says one mother. ‘But nobody imagined it was going to be something as awful as this.’

It was an email from the chair of the college’s board of governors, later that evening, which brought news of a tragedy so unfathomable that the school community is still struggling to process it: the bodies of head teacher Emma Pattison, her husband George and their seven-year-old daughter, Lettie, had been found on school grounds. ‘Everyone is still in shock and disbelief,’ the mother says.

‘It’s so crazy what happened. I don’t think the children can really take it in or understand how terrible it is.’

Most parents broke the news to their children on Sunday evening. Those who board at the school are believed to have been told of the triple deaths by stunned staff.

Epsom College head Emma Pattison, 45, her husband George, 39, and their seven-year-old daughter Lettie

While assemblies were held and counselling was offered to all pupils on Monday and Tuesday, a decision was made to bring half-term forward and the school has been closed since Wednesday.

While Surrey police investigations into this horrific murder-suicide continue, in due course an inquest will be opened by the county’s coroner, who will want to know what made 39-year-old Durham University graduate and chartered accountant George Pattison shoot his 45-year-old wife and daughter before turning his shotgun on himself. It is a question that haunts grief-stricken relatives and those who knew and loved the family.

No one who was with the Pattisons last weekend remembers seeing anything untoward. Earlier on that bright, chilly day last Saturday, the family were seen walking alongside the River Mole near a picturesque area in nearby Cobham known as The Tilt. They were ‘silent’ and ‘straight-faced’ according to one who saw them, but he says he didn’t read anything sinister into it at the time.

And that evening, the husband and wife hosted a small dinner party for friends with ‘no indication’ that anything was amiss.

‘Nothing unusual happened. There were no arguments, no indication he would go on to do something so horrific a short time later,’ a friend of the family claimed this week.

But around midnight, Emma made a distressed phone call to her sister Deborah, who jumped into her car and drove from her home in south-east London. She arrived at Emma’s grace-and-favour head teacher house on the edge of Epsom College’s vast grounds just after 1am to find her sister, niece and brother-in-law dead.

What makes their deaths doubly shocking is that, outwardly at least, the Pattisons, who had been married for 12 years, appeared to enjoy the kind of family life to which so many aspire.

Emma was one of the most high-flying teachers in the UK and only six months into her role as Epsom College’s first ever female head. Her husband was a company director. In recent years they had spent thousands creating their dream home and landscaped garden in Caterham, Surrey, where neighbours eyed up the expensive cars on the drive.

Emma made a distressed phone call to her sister Deborah Kirk (pictured right), who jumped into her car and drove from her home in south-east London out to her in Surrey

Their only child — happy and bubbly Lettie — was being educated at a private prep school. Above all, both Emma and her husband were from close-knit, loving families who utterly adored them. Nothing, then, that might point to the horror brewing behind the scenes.

Yet it emerged this week that there had been problems in the couple’s relationship, going back several years.

In 2016, when Lettie was barely a year old, Emma was briefly arrested after her husband dialled 999 during a row at home, around midnight, alleging that she had slapped him around the face.

Two minutes later, apparently regretting the call, George Pattison dialled 999 again, this time asking officers not to come to the couple’s four-bedroom detached home because it was a ‘trivial matter and he had overreacted’.

Nevertheless, the police turned up and arrested Emma on suspicion of common assault. She was questioned, with a solicitor present, in the early hours before being released without charge.

While Surrey police investigations into this horrific murder-suicide continue, an inquest will be opened by the county’s coroner

Given her professional position — at the time she was deputy head teacher at another independent secondary school, St John’s in nearby Leatherhead — it must have been a huge relief to know that the matter wouldn’t be taken any further.

But tellingly, during their questioning, she told police that she and her husband were undergoing counselling to overcome marital problems. Among the issues, detectives were told, was Emma’s high-profile and very demanding job. Not long after that disturbing incident, in September 2016 she took a further leap up the career ladder, assuming her first headship at Croydon High School, a private day school for girls just outside London, and taking on even more responsibilities.

It was an extraordinary rise for a woman raised on a farm in Lincolnshire who, after studying French and English Literature at Leeds University, started her professional life as a graduate trainee with Thomas Cook, hoping to travel the world.

Instead, Emma Kirk, as she was then, found herself based in Bromley, South London, which — she said in a recent interview — was ‘not quite the sparkly lights of where I’d imagined I’d end up’.

The idea of teaching as an alternative career was sparked while flicking through a copy of the Times Educational Supplement in a coffee shop.

Her first teaching job was at Lutterworth College in South Leicestershire, before moving to private Caterham School in Surrey in 2005, then to Guildford High School in 2008, where she rose to become Head of Foreign Languages. She moved to St John’s School, Leatherhead, in 2012. And six years after her 2016 appointment as head of Croydon High School, Emma was propelled into one of the most coveted jobs in UK education.

She took up the £245,000-a-year post in September 2022 and in an interview with the website School Management Plus last month, she was described as ‘fresh and forward-thinking, a far cry from the traditional perception of aloof elitism in the independent sector’.

Emma took up the £245,000-a-year post at Epsom College in September last year

While Emma’s head teacher roles demanded long hours and personal attendance at a multitude of school events at evenings and weekends, George Pattison, professionally at least, was living in his wife’s shadow. They certainly had different backgrounds. George was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1983, where his civil servant father met his Jamaican mother before the family moved to Kent. In the late Nineties, the couple were living in the village of Eythorne, near Dover, where they ran the Post Office. John Steel, who has lived in the village for nearly 40 years, remembers George and his younger sister as ‘very pleasant’ children.

Later, the Pattisons moved to the nearby town of Sandwich, where they set up their own travel agency, and also lived in Deal for a while.

A neighbour there described George and his sister as ‘very good-looking, extremely polite and I remember George as being rather shy’.

After studying at Barton Court Grammar School in Canterbury, then Durham University, George trained with accountancy giant Deloitte and was admitted as a chartered accountant in 2008.

He worked in a variety of industries including corporate finance, investment management and financial consultancy but, according to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, did not hold a practising certificate or an insolvency licence, which meant he could not set up an accountancy firm in his own name.

His consultancy business, Tanglewood, had a net worth of just £163, according to its most recent accounts.

Turning his back on finance, in 2012 he set his sights on becoming a wine merchant, going into business with an Australian stockbroker friend.

In a presentation for their business, Castle Street Vintners, a UK distributor of German wines, he described himself as ‘a career accountant desperate to find something better to do with his days’ and an ‘enthusiastic taster’.

George Pattison, 39, shot  his wife and daughter before turning his shotgun on himself at Epsom College (pictured)

In the presentation he wrote: ‘My love affair with wine started on my first trip to Burgundy, where I found a few wines that not only captured the natural characteristics of the grapes but elevated them — this was a life-changing experience for me.’

In 2014, however, accounts for the pair’s company, Rees Charles Capital, showed the firm owed £318 and it was worth only £1,400 before being closed down in 2016.

He and Emma had married in 2011 — the same year George’s mother, Elet, died aged 56. Daughter Lettie was named Elette after the grandmother she never met.

This week, neighbours in Caterham painted a picture of a couple living very different lives in recent years. One recalls that while Emma was out at work each day, George ‘seemed not to work’ and was often at home, where he ‘pottered around with his wine and his newspaper’, behaviour that made him seem much older than his years.

It was George, who appears to have overseen a massive renovation project at their home in 2018 that involved the demolition of an old conservatory and the building of a new architect-designed rear extension with a roof terrace.

The couple, said the neighbour, were very different. Emma, often seen out jogging, was ‘vivacious, motivated and positive’ and, while often out with her daughter, was always keen to say hello. George, meanwhile, was ‘quite quiet’, they said: ‘I got a wave from him but he wasn’t the sort to chat. He just used to sit around watching football and TV, watering the plants.’

While the building work was going on, said the neighbour, the couple brought round a bottle of wine to apologise for the noise and Emma had jokingly remarked that the renovations had cost them ‘a fortune’. ‘He said that they had clearly spent loads of money on it so I did hope they weren’t getting into debt.’

A neighbour said Emma and her husband were very different people 

In fact, Land Registry documents show that the couple remortgaged the house in January 2022. By the time they had finished work, the somewhat old-fashioned home they bought for nearly £620,000 had been transformed into a modernist dream.

The ground-floor extension, with two sets of bi-fold doors leading out into the terraced garden, became a stunning sitting room housing a grand piano, which Emma, a talented musician and singer, used to play. The master bedroom, meanwhile, had its own balcony furnished with sun beds.

Emma’s new role as head at Epsom College, however, came with a grand detached house perched on the edge of the school grounds, and last September the Caterham home was put up for sale. According to former neighbours in Caterham, only Emma and Lettie moved into their new grace-and-favour home in Epsom, while George spent most of his time in the old family home until the £1.5 million sale went through last month and he handed over the keys to estate agents Hamptons.

In December, Emma gave an insight into all this upheaval when she spoke to sixth-form students for the school podcast Epsom Insight, telling them: ‘It has been a really big change for my family.

‘We’ve obviously moved house, we’ve bought a dog, I’ve got a new job, my husband’s got a new job, which wasn’t meant to happen but did, and my daughter has started a new school.’

She also said she couldn’t wait to experience her first Founder’s Day when pupils, parents, staff and alumni enjoy picnics and games.

It was his move to his wife’s new accommodation on school grounds in Epsom that prompted George to notify Surrey Police of his change of address, in accordance with the terms of the licence he held for his shotgun.

Homes are only inspected when an application for a licence is made or renewed and so, rather than visiting in person, Surrey officers made a routine phone call to George last Thursday, February 2, to check that his shotgun was being stored correctly.

Two days later, police believe he used the same weapon to kill his wife and daughter and then to take his own life.

What might have prompted him to inflict such evil on those closest to him may never be known. But there are other pressing questions that must be answered.

Did police know, for example, that the address to which George Pattison had moved his shotgun was part of school premises? Did school governors know that such a weapon was being kept in a house regularly used for school events attended by pupils?

For the time being, of course, it is those left behind who must try to find a way to come to terms with what happened: Emma’s parents and younger sister but also George’s father, who doted on his eldest granddaughter; and sister, who has two children including a daughter just a few months younger than Lettie.

The seven-year-old cousins were close friends from birth and often played together.

How on earth do you explain to a child the kind of horror that even adults struggle to comprehend?

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