WYCHERLEY MURDERS: Retired cop describes the moment double-killer called from France saying he was 'terrified' of his wife

For the first time, details of the conversation double murderer Christopher Edwards had with police from exile in France, before he handed himself in to British border forces have been revealed.

Retired Mansfield police officer Brian Costello was on duty in October 2013 when he was tasked with investigating a phone call which had come in overnight after a woman had contacted the City of London Police to say that her step-son had been in touch.

Edwards, along with his wife Susan, had vanished without trace nine months earlier after ‘borrowing’ £10,000 from his employers.

The employers, not surprisingly, had reported him missing after he failed to show up for work, along with his step-mother Elizabeth Edwards, when she could not get hold of him.

But there was a twist.

When Christopher finally called Elizabeth, after there had been no word for months, begging for money, he confessed that there were two bodies buried beneath the garden of a house in Forest Town, Mansfield, that they had been there for the past 15 years, and that Susan was involved.

It would later emerge that Christopher Edwards had shot his parents-in-law in cold blood at their home in Blenheim Close in 1998, spurred on by Susan, and kept the elderly couple ‘alive in the eyes of the world’ for a decade and a half with an intricate web of lies.

Following Brian’s investigations, the case was handed over to the East Midlands Major Crime Unit, and specialist officers descended on the property, where the skeletal remains of William and Patricia Wycherley were exhumed.

But in the conversations with his mother and later with Brian, Christopher trotted out the well-rehearsed version of events that would later become their defence - that Susan had been visiting her parents, that she had been woken in the middle of the night by two loud bangs, that she had rushed into her parents’ bedroom to find her father lying dead on the floor with her mother standing over him with a smoking gun in her hand.

Susan had then wrestled the gun from Patricia, shooting her twice in the process, before duping Christopher back the following weekend to help her dispose of the bodies.

Brian, 55, from Bilsthorpe, told your Chad: “I had been on a day shift as a response officer at Mansfield Police Station and anything that had come in from overnight was dished out to be looked at.

“I was given a job that had come in from the City of London Police, which had been forwarded to us. A woman called Elizabeth Edwards had been in touch to say that her step-son Christopher had been on the telephone to her from somewhere in France.

“He told her that he was living in fear of Susan because she had admitted to being involved in the deaths of her parents.

“He had said that Susan had originally told him that they were both invited to stay with her parents the following weekend, and it was only when she put the key in the front door, that she told him that her parents were dead upstairs, wrapped in a quilt.”

Brian then passed his contacts onto Elizabeth and told her to give them to Christopher if he called again and to ask him to get in touch.

He then began his own investigations, looking for a death certificate for William Wycherley, but couldn’t find anything. He unearthed the missing person’s report, filed by police in London a year earlier, and was eventually able to track down the current owner of the Blenheim Close address - after the Edwards had sold it in 2006 when they ran out of money.

“When I spoke to him, he admitted that he had thought it had been strange at the time,” Brian said. “All the furniture was still in there, and it was like the occupants had just disappeared.

“Later, I was at a Harvest Festival event and my phone rang and I realised it was a French number - it was Christopher. I told him who I was, he was really nervous but he told me the same story he had given to his step-mother. He said he was scared of Susan and that he was calling from a telephone box because he didn’t want her to know.”

When Christopher called for a third time, Brian encouraged him to hand himself in for questioning, before passing on the case to Detective Chief Inspector Rob Griffin - now Assistant Chief Constable at Nottinghamshire Police - to pick up the baton.

Brian, who retired from the force last year after 25 years and now works for Trading Standards, spoke out prior to the release of Landscapers - a major four-part drama about the case starring Olivia Colman and David Thewlis.

The Sky/HBO series explores the murders, but also the complex and fascinating relationship between the Edwards, which led them to murdering her parents, and swindling hundreds of thousands of pounds as a result of their deaths - plundering their savings, claiming their pensions and benefits, taking out loans in their names and using the dead couple as guarantors for other loans in their names, and eventually selling their home.

In the meantime, all of the Wycherleys’ correspondence was redirected to the Edwards’ Dagenham home, where they spent 15 years responding to letters from doctors and government officials, pretending to be William and Patricia Wycherley.

They also wrote letters and Christmas cards to relatives, pretending to be the Wycherleys and later as themselves - describing the elderly couple’s travels in Ireland.

They also told neighbours a range of stories - telling some they had moved to Morecambe, others that they had emigrated to Australia.

It was only when they received a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions on the eve of what would have been William Wycherley’s 100th birthday, insisting on seeing him face-to-face to assess his benefit needs, that they knew the game was up.

The pair fled to France and, after running out of money, Christopher made the fateful phone call to his step-mother, begging for more cash and revealing the whereabouts of the Wycherleys’ remains.

“It’s the first time any case of mine has been so high-profile,” added Brian. “I was in it right from the start, so it will be interesting to see what they make of it.

“If a call comes in like that, if someone calls saying there are bodies buried under the lawn, your first reaction is ‘really?’. Cops can be cynical - you see people at the worst points of their lives.

“But Elizabeth Edwards came across as so plausible and so genuine, it drove me on to get to the bottom of it. It’s that almost ghoulish thing of wanting to know what happened, and then realising that the Wycherleys really were buried under that lawn.

“It’s a unique one for me in 25 years of policing, and one that I’m very proud of. If I hadn’t done what I did, then the Edwards could still be free and the Wycherleys could still be buried under that lawn.”

Landscapers airs from December 6.

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