A man strangled his wife and four stepchildren in a jealous rage after he discovered that a brief affair with his teenage stepdaughter was at an end, a court heard yesterday. Lee Ford, 33, reacted to the news that his 17-year-old stepdaughter Sarah had found a boyfriend of her own age, by killing her family and hiding them in a shed where they lay undiscovered for a month.Ford, a part-time labourer from Redruth, Cornwall, pleaded guilty to the murders yesterday and faces a lifetime in jail after being given five life sentences for what the prosecution described as a "pitiful tragedy and a tale of true horror".Bristol Crown Court heard how an "openly and forcefully jealous" Ford strangled his victims with a rope and then sought to cover his tracks by saying that his wife, Lesley, 36, had run away with the four children from her first marriage.Mrs Ford had sought an injunction and occupation order on their Cornish bungalow because her husband was violent and she suspected a sexual relationship with Sarah.Nigel Pascoe QC, for the prosecution, said it was a "matter of regret" that social services had failed to react adequately to her concerns about the threat posed by Ford.Mr Pascoe said: "It is very likely that Lesley Ford was very frightened of her husband at times in the months before her murder."Ford was arrested a month after the murders on 31 August last year. He told police that he had attacked his wife in the bedroom and strangled the children in the kitchen of their bungalow in the remote Cornish village of Carnkie, near Redruth.Ford, who in the month prior to the attack had spent entire days locked in his garage watching television, claimed he had "flipped" after an argument with his wife about access to the children.After his arrest Ford said: "For the life of me I do not even understand why I did what I did. If I had planned to do what I did there is no way I would have left them on the property with my kids there."But Mr Pascoe alleged that, instead of killing on a whim, the post-mortem examinations and Ford's subsequent actions showed how calculated the "clean and efficient" killings were "The cause of death was given as ligature strangling. They were garrotted so precisely as to leave little or no bruising and no damage to the structure of the neck," Mr Pascoe said.Lesley and Lee Ford married in June 1990 a year after Mrs Ford divorced Michael Tranter, from Telford, with whom she had the four children. The two children the Fords had together, who cannot be named for legal reasons,survived the killing spree because of the "blood relationship to the defendant", according to the prosecution.Ford went to great lengths to cover up the murders, the court heard. He returned his stepsons' books to the nearby Helston School and said they would not be coming back and he then attempted to cash in Sarah's last wage cheque from a local McDonald's restaurant.He also removed the bodies of his two stepdaughters and buried them in a freshly ploughed field four miles away, leaving the remaining three bodies in the wood shed.Police first learnt Mrs Ford and her four eldest children, who all had the surname Tranter, were missing at the end of September following a tip-off from her brother.On 4 October, police held a press conference about their disappearance and revealed that Ford and the two youngest children had also gone missing.
He was stopped by police travelling westbound along the A30 near Bodmin later the same day and his two children were found safe and well with relatives.Yesterday Mr Tranter, 37, said he was gladthe killer had admitted his guilt but demanded to know the truth of the tragedy "I want to know what happened and why it happened. Whether it will ever come out I don't know, but I really hope it does," he said. Mr Tranter added that he was relievedhis four "babies" were buried near his home in Telford.. The former US president Bill Clinton, on the final day of his visit to Ireland, yesterday met people injured and bereaved in two of the worst incidents of the Troubles, the Omagh and Enniskillen bombings. The former US president Bill Clinton, on the final day of his visit to Ireland, yesterday met people injured and bereaved in two of the worst incidents of the Troubles, the Omagh and Enniskillen bombings. Those who lost relatives in the Omagh attack, in which the Real IRA killed 29 people in 1998, said that Mr Clinton had promised to support their campaign to take a civil court action against the suspected bombers. He spoke with approval of the Bush administration's move, earlier this month, to outlaw the Real IRA.Mr Clinton, who had met Omagh relatives on a previous occasion, said: "It was good to see them again.
A few were there who were still in hospital the last time I was here. They were obviously glad our country put the group which set the bomb on the terrorist list and I was pleased the judicial process is making progress."I was also very grateful to them for continuing their commitment to the peace process and urged them to keep it up. I told them I would do what I could to help."Michael Gallagher, whose son Aidan was among those killed, said: "Mr Clinton said he would do all he could to help us when we are in the States He said he was right behind us. It's fantastic support."In the County Fermanagh town of Enniskillen, where 11 people were killed by an IRA bomb in 1987, Mr Clinton unveiled a plaque on the site of the attack. The William Jefferson Clinton International Peace Centre is to be built at the spot.
