Countryside homicide

An improvised car bomb should have killed Margaret Backhouse. She survived by chance. Why would anyone want to kill this elegant farmer's wife? Or was the target her adulterous husband?

The village of Horton in South Gloucestershire is small, pretty and quiet.

Nothing ever happens.

It has a population of around 350 people. There is a single road from which large farm houses are set back. There is a village hall. Not even a pub.

Margaret Backhouse survived a car bomb attack

It is in the Cotswolds, an area of rolling countryside in South West England so beautiful it is protected by law.

But Lady Luck was protecting Margaret Backhouse on the morning of April 9th 1984.

The 37-year-old farmer’s wife left her house and walked to the garage to get her family car.

Margaret was due to drive her young son and daughter to school.

Steph Beardon, a detective constable in 1984, was part of the investigation into what happened next. She takes up the story:

The car blew up. Margaret should have died. But - as a fluke - the Volvo car which was built for severe Scandinavian winters had a metal heated plate in the seat.

This diverted the blast away from her body.

If Margaret’s children had been in the back they would have died instantly.

The wreckage of Margaret Backhouse’s car

Margaret struggled from the car and crawled away - a driver of a passing school bus saw her and raised the alarm.

She was taken to hospital while the Army Bomb Squad and police arrived.

Police first thought animal rights activists were behind the explosion. They were running a series of bombing campaigns in the UK at the time. But their targets were usually laboratories or scientists involved in animal testing. Random farms were never a focus.

Bristol Post following the explosion, April 1984

Bomb Disposal experts discovered an improvised device made from a length of scaffold filled with lead shot.

And quickly they started getting information.

Margaret’s husband Graham, 43, started telling officers he had been the victim of a hate campaign.

Dark warnings had been placed around his farm over previous weeks. Handwritten notes warning he would come to harm.

The latest had been placed a few days earlier with a sheep’s head stuck to a pole. The message read: ‘You Next.’

Backhouse also told police he had another reason to be hated: he was an unfaithful husband. He told detectives about a string of affairs with his friends’ wives and even a young shepherdess who worked on a neighbouring farm.