Lucas Markham and Kim Edwards were only 15 when they were convicted of murdering Kim’s mother and younger sister. For the first time, Kim’s grandmother, Maxine Follows, tells her side of the story, and questions how the criminal justice system treats children.
With her soft face, fine brown hair and slight frame, Edwards was, to Follows, “like a little 10-year-old girl. She wasn’t streetwise, she was very fragile, she wouldn’t talk. She was self-harming and very, very thin. But Lucas, he was a proper lad. I can understand why she fell for him really… big muscles and that. But she was so timid. For her to be called the leader…” Follows’s voice trails off. “She wasn’t. And he wasn’t, actually. It was another girl that said it to him, when they were in McDonald’s: ‘Why don’t you go and kill Kim’s mum?’”
In 2017, Edwards and Markham became the youngest couple ever convicted of double murder in Britain. On 13 April 2016, Markham, Edwards’s boyfriend, stabbed to death her mother, Elizabeth, 49, a churchgoing dinner lady, and her 13-year-old sister, Katie, in the beds of their redbrick terrace. Police found the teenage couple 36 hours later, still in the house, with the bodies upstairs.
The tabloids revelled in sensational details. The Sun called Edwards and Markham “the Twilight killers”, “teen sweethearts” who “took a bath, ate ice cream and watched the vampire film”. The Mirror headline ran: “Horror moment ‘Twilight killer’ teens decided to slaughter family before cosy film night.”
But there was something about that description that sounded to me, not callous, but childish. How had something so heinous and violent happened in an apparently normal family?
In court, Philip Joseph, a forensic scientist who was an expert witness for the prosecution, likened the young couple to Bonnie and Clyde. Elizabeth’s fiancee, Graham Green, called Kim, “another Myra Hindley”. “She should never, never be let out”, he said.
Edwards and Markham were jointly sentenced to life for murder, to serve a minimum term of 20 years without parole, later reduced to 17 and a half years on appeal.
“When they said 20 years, I was sobbing my heart out,” Follows tells me. “My first thought was: ‘I’ll be dead when she gets out.’”
“I was really angry, but more sad, because I thought it was too long,” Follows says. “If she’d actually killed them, I don’t think I could forgive her.”
Critically, Edwards did not physically commit murder: she was in the house but it was Markham who stabbed her mother and sister to death. “I do not think she was guilty of murder – she was an accessory,” Follows says. “She deserved to be sentenced. I’ve got no qualms about that, but I think she should only do 10 years. She has said she regrets it. She regretted it straight away”.
Edwards is now 25. She has served 10 years. Follows believes she should appeal her sentence.
Now, according to legal experts I have spoken to, it seems Edwards may have a case.
I started covering Edwards’s case in 2016. I went to Spalding in Lincolnshire and found a once-wealthy tulip town depressed into convenience stores, charity shops and agricultural land. I walked the desolate Coronation Channel waterway. I read Edwards’s strangely poetic journals, which revealed a suicidal teenager alienated from her family.
I spoke to her neighbours, and met her stepfather, Green, at his dark bedsit, between shifts driving lorries. He would not talk to me without payment.
Over the years since, I tried to contact Edwards in prison.
Then, in 2023, I received an email. “I am Kim Edwards’ grandma and I would like to defend her a little,” it began. “She is very remorseful about the death of her mother and sister, she never wanted them killed, but she was told that if she didn’t help him kill them, he would kill her as well.”
I had taken the train to Skegness, surrounded by mums and dads drinking beer, heading to the seaside with the kids. Follows, soft-faced with white hair, was hugging a cardigan around herself outside Boston station. “I don’t forgive Kim for what she did,” she will say later, looking at me coolly with piercing blue eyes, “but I love her like any grandma should.”
Follows is a small woman who keeps herself to herself. She is straight-talking in a way that seems to reflect the desolate flatlands where she lives.
She asks me to make it clear she was not paid for this interview and that she is talking to me with Edwards’s permission. This is the first time she has spoken publicly about the case.
Follows remembers the day she heard on the news about the murders in Spalding. “I thought: ‘That address sounds familiar’, but didn’t twig.”
She had not seen “the girls” [her granddaughters, Kim and Katie] in years. Her eldest son, Peter Edwards, a welder, was their father. Elizabeth Edwards also had a daughter, Mary, from a previous relationship, and for a time, the three children lived in a caravan in Follows’s garden.
At the time of the murders, Elizabeth was uniformly praised as a churchgoing mother. I interviewed neighbours who told me how upbeat she was, and her vicar who told me of her mothering instincts. But in private, Follows claims, Elizabeth “wasn’t a natural mother” – she “could be a nasty piece of work”, and “she could be violent with the kids”.
Follows worried about how “hard” she was on Mary. Follows claims she witnessed Elizabeth “locking Mary in a caravan for hours to go to work” and says she was so concerned about Mary that she once called social services herself. Follows tells me an odd story; that once, as a punishment, she saw Elizabeth hang Mary’s favourite cuddly toy from a washing line with its arms and legs cut off.
I asked Follows if, at 14, Kim fully understood the concept of death? “Yes, she would [have done]”, she said immediately, “because Kim had a pet chinchilla who got really sick and, instead of taking it to the vets, Liz put it in a plastic container and put the lid on it until [the chinchilla] suffocated. That’s the sort of person Liz was.”
Follows’s son’s marriage to Elizabeth had broken down by the time Kim was just two. After that, Follows claims, Peter and her family were kept away from the children. She discovered later that Elizabeth had told Kim that her grandmother was dead.
Kim’s older half-sister, Mary, told me on another occasion that the separation happened because Peter “was very abusive to my mum” and that they had moved between “several refuges” growing up, before moving to Spalding. Reports at the time claimed Kim watched Elizabeth suffer domestic abuse at Peter’s hands, who was described in court as an “abusive drug addict”. Follows disputes this. “Peter did smoke weed,” she admits, and “he could be moody, but he wasn’t violent. He was a coward, to be honest, but hard-working.” Whatever the truth, it is clear that Kim grew up amid instability and violence.
Kim was six when she first came to the attention of social services: Elizabeth had punched her in the face during an argument over a broken television. Elizabeth referred herself to social services, and the children spent four months with a foster family before being returned home.
Kim’s relationship with her mother seemed to inform her mental health issues. At 12, Kim wrote to her caseworker that her mother favoured her sister, Katie, and that “made me feel like shit”. She then told support workers that her mother had tried to strangle her (although Elizabeth denies this). In February 2015, Kim confided in a teacher that she felt “lonely and depressed”, adding: “I feel like no one cares. I have tried to be strong for so long but now I see death is the only way.” The teacher referred Kim to the child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs), which reported a “concern level” of two out of 10.
A few months later, Kim met Markham. In her diaries, she wrote that she had first noticed him in an English lesson at Sir John Gleed school (now Spalding Academy), hurling a chair across the room. Within months, he asked her out on Facebook. With Markham, Kim told police, she felt “happy for once”. “Until he came along, no one had ever listened to my thoughts. It was the closest I’ve ever felt to anyone.”
Kim had been popular at school. A neighbour in Spalding told me she “is one of these who seems always the nice, sweet, kind, little child – always seems like an angel”.
Lucas, by contrast, was seen as a loner and bully. He was four when his mother, Anne, died from leukaemia at 29. His father was a violent drinker from a Traveller background. He had moved between foster homes before moving in with his aunt. “He’s always the devilment,” the same neighbour told me, “out there looking for mischief.”
Still, it seemed Kim and Lucas shared the same attitude to life – that “it was shit… and only going to get worse”, as Kim told court psychiatrists. But in each other, they found comfort. On Facebook, they posted pictures together, commenting on each other’s posts. “Beautiful like always xxxx” (Lucas, July 2015); “perfectness xxxx” (Lucas, December 2015).
Kim told police that Coronation Channel had been her and Lucas’s “special place”. They took long walks along its muddy banks and in nearby fields. Lucas’s Facebook profile picture still shows them together, beneath the trees – Kim with messy hair and a toothy grin; Lucas shyly smiling. At home, in her pink diary, Kim wrote: “I want to be cremated and I want [our] ashes to be scattered in our special place.”
Elizabeth disapproved of the relationship. One neighbour told me she worried that Lucas seemed “controlling and possessive”. Another claims they saw Kim with a black eye and a fat lip. A friend of Kim’s posted to Facebook a screengrab of text messages Lucas had sent her, reading: “Slag”, “slut”, “dumb dumb”, “Bitch”, “attention seeker”, “retard”, “fucking idiot”.
After the trial, Follows heard from people in Spalding that Kim had “had to look at the floor if she was with [Lucas]. She couldn’t talk to anybody else. She had to wear dark clothes. People have said she looked miserable a lot of the time.”
Follows tells me that her son Peter had spent “thousands of pounds” trying to find and see his daughters. At one point, he was granted supervised visits, but Kim later told Follows that Elizabeth told the children to “scream until Peter was told to leave”. During one particularly angry row. Elizabeth told Kim she would turn out just like her father. Distraught, Kim fled to Lucas’s house, where they barricaded themselves in his room. Kim returned home to find Elizabeth had bagged her possessions. Saying after, it was clear she “did not belong to the family any more”.
In March 2016, things reached crisis point. Lucas’s behaviour saw him excluded from school and sent to a unit for troubled pupils 15 miles away. Kim attempted suicide, and was admitted to hospital. A report by Lincolnshire County Council suggested she needed professional help “sooner rather than later”. Not long after, on 3 April, she put a photograph of herself on Facebook, eyes downcast, expression blank. “Where’s your beautiful smile?” wrote Elizabeth. “It disappeared,” Kim replied. It is the last picture Kim posted.
Days later, the conversation unfolded in McDonald’s. Lucas told police that Kim thought he was joking: “Then she realised I was being serious, so she started being serious.”
Two days later, on 13 April, Lucas made his way, in the dark, along the banks of the Coronation Channel and down an alley at the back of Kim’s house. He scaled a fence, then climbed the single-storey extension to tap three times on the bathroom window so that Kim could let him in. “He had to walk a hell of a long way, over half an hour in the dark,” says Follows. “In my eyes, he was determined.”
Lucas carried a backpack containing four kitchen knives.
Follows claims the police never contacted her to tell her that her granddaughter and daughter-in-law had been killed, or that her other granddaughter was in custody and suspected of committing the crime. She found out two days after the incident when Peter, came home. “I was so upset I had to go sick from work for weeks,” she says. She is still angry about how the police treated her, as if she was a criminal herself.
Her son told her he had been in the police station all day, “trying to see [Kim] or to make sure she got proper legal representation”.
Follows says she waited all weekend before a police family liaison officer finally arrived on Monday. “The police were heartless and uncaring towards us,” she says. “They treated us as if we were criminals,” she says, telling me that an officer involved in the case, “made it very plain he didn’t like us. He called Kim ‘a murdering little cow’ to my face.”
It is a legal requirement during a formal interview that any child suspected of a crime should be accompanied by an “appropriate adult”, such as a parent or guardian, or another responsible adult who is deemed able to advise the child. Although Kim was 14, Follows claims that her family were not invited to attend her police interview, which was instead conducted in the presence of an appropriate adult who Kim did not know.
“So, in that first interview, she had a responsible adult and the duty solicitor,” Follows says, “We didn’t know who her solicitor was. I’d have wanted her to use our family solicitor. I always ask her: ‘Why didn’t you stay silent until you got a proper solicitor?’ because she might have been saying things she didn’t realise were incriminating.”
Follows claims the detective who interviewed Kim called her “a little cunt” and told her, “if she didn’t tell him what had happened, she would never see the light of day again”. “She was frightened to death of what that meant,” Follows tells me, “so told him what he wanted to know.”
A College of Policing guide to questioning states that “officers and staff should gather information in an objective way”. In Kim’s recorded police interview, played to the court, she is asked: “What exactly happened to cause you to want to, to plan this?”
“Erm, well… I don’t know, really – well, it just kind of happened because…”
“Cos it’s quite a drastic thing to, to happen” says the officer. “You clearly, from what you’re saying, had your reasons. I mean, what were those reasons?”
“Erm, just that… ever since like I was young, like, I never got on with my mum…”
Lincolnshire police insists Follows’s “claims are all completely false” but declined to give its version of events. In a statement the police said: “We can categorically say that all the claims raised by the grandmother of Kim Edwards in relation to the investigation into the murder of Kim’s mother and sister have no substance. Our investigation and team members dealt with Kim with care and sensitivity, both due to her age and the gravity of the crimes which she was later found guilty of.”
I made a freedom of information request to Lincolnshire police, asking to receive a full recording of Kim’s interview. The request was refused.
“If it was my client, and I knew they had a history of mental illness and a recent suicide attempt, I’d be concerned that I didn’t know enough about their ability to undergo a police interrogation without a mental health expert advising me,” says Shauneen Lambe, director for the Youth Justice Legal Centre. She points out the police and the Crown Prosecution Service are required by law to consider a child’s welfare first – even before a criminal case.
In the months before the trial, Follows visited Kim in Clayfields House secure unit in Nottingham, an interconnected series of low red buildings that look like a small boarding school rather than a prison, with communal lounges and individual rooms. It reminded Follows of the care home she had grown up in, “but with locks on the doors”. Follows had been in and out of care since she was a baby, as had her brothers. At 16, she became pregnant to a much older man, with her first child, Peter, and was sent to a mother and baby home. She ran away with her now husband. She knows what it is like to be a child alone in the world – that is why she reached out to Kim.
For months, Kim would not utter a word when Follows visited, “or have a hug”. “She would flinch if you went near her.” Kim was self-harming and on suicide watch. “She was a very fragile girl – she just wouldn’t talk,” Follows says. Kim had become very thin and was self-harming. Slowly, over months of Follows’s visits to Clayfields House, Kim opened up. “Kim loved it there,” Follows says. “She said to me it was the only place she ever felt loved.”
Follows attended every day of her granddaughter’s trial. Kim sat in the dock, a tiny, fragile figure. Follows “just sat there sobbing”. Her husband accompanied her: “We didn’t realise how brutal it would be, not with her being a child. The actual process. Even I was frightened in the court, as a grown-up. No child should have to go through that process. There should be another way.”
On the third night, Kim let him in. According to their plan, Lucas would kill Kim’s mother, then Kim would kill Katie. But Kim told police that she hid in the bathroom, in the foetal position, listening as Lucas slashed her mother’s throat eight times, targeting her voice box, slicing her vocal cords so she could not scream out. Kim then listened to Katie, 13, plead for her life. “If she [Kim] could have stopped it there and then, she would have,” Follows says, “I think she was frightened to death of him. I think she was traumatised. Robotic.”
It was that night, Follows claims, that Kim lost her virginity. “I think she’d rather have done it with him than what he might have done to the bodies.”
At first, Lucas confessed to the murders, initially telling police it had been his idea, explaining how he had used a kitchen knife to stab Elizabeth and Katie. Kim was advised by her counsel to deny murder, with prosecution experts claiming a mental abnormality impaired her ability to form rational judgments. In court, experts spoke about how Kim was an “emotionally vulnerable” person who had developed an adjustment disorder against a background of severe attachment problems aggravated by her relationship with Lucas. Police evaluations showed Kim had signs of a personality disorder – although one that cannot be formally diagnosed in someone under the age of 18.
Sitting in the dock, Kim looked at the floor. “She was just resigned to what they were saying,” Follows says. “Kim didn’t say anything in her defence because her solicitor advised her not to.”
England and Wales has the lowest age of criminal responsibility in Europe, reduced to 10 after public outcry following the murder of the two-year-old James Bulger in 1993. From 10, children can be arrested, charged and tried in court for criminal offences as adults. The UK is one of the only places in the world where a child can receive a life sentence.
The UN committee that monitors the Convention on the Rights of a Child has repeatedly called for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised to 12. The government has promised to “carefully consider” a recommendation by the Bar Council suggesting it should be increased to 14.
Lambe says that a central tenet of children’s treatment in the adult criminal justice system is “effective participation”: “For a child to effectively participate in a trial, they have to be able to understand any defences available to them, and they have to be able to challenge the prosecution’s version of events,” she says.
Lambe explains that adaptations are suggested for child defendants, including “live links” so children do not have to sit in court, providing intermediaries or allowing them to sit near family members and their lawyer for “easy and informal communication”. “None of that happened,” Follows says.
In summing up, the judge spoke about how “this was an entirely joint offence. You were in it together… While you, Lucas, did the actual killings, Kim willed it to happen and assisted all the way. Both of you are perfectly intelligent and knew exactly what you were doing. Either of you could have backed out at any time, but you were determined to do it together… I see no reason to distinguish between you in any way.”
“I don’t think they should have been treated the same,” Follows says. “If they had been tried separately, perhaps Kim’s counsel would have allowed her to speak about her upbringing and her relationship to [Lucas].”
A serious case review carried out by the Lincolnshire Safeguarding Children Partnership and the Safer Lincolnshire Partnership, published in April 2021, suggested that Camhs could have more fully investigated Kim’s deep-seated issues and abuse. It found that Lucas was violent and verbally abusive at home and school, and questioned why no professionals considered whether his aunt was a victim of his domestic violence. It notes that Kim and Lucas’s relationship was volatile, with elements of coercion and control, but says that Kim’s situation was not viewed as domestic violence – without examining whether it should have been.
Research by the Centre for Women’s Justice, which is campaigning to have domestic violence recognised as a defence for women convicted of murder, shows that at least 57% of women in prison and under community supervision are victims of domestic abuse. For many, the offences are a direct result of their abuse.
“Coercive control is not a defence to murder,” says Clare Wade, the KC who represented Sally Challen, who killed her husband after years of his abusive behaviour. “However, if a defendant is able to show duress, it could have been a mitigating factor in sentencing.”
If it can be shown that Kim struggled to explain herself fully at trial because of the presence of someone who had control over her, she may have been unable to present an accurate defence.
Lambe suggests that Edwards, who is now in an adult prison which cannot be named, has the right to ask the Criminal Cases Review Commission to review her case.
“On the anniversary [of the murders] and on Katie’s birthday, she goes into a deep depression,” Follows says. “She won’t talk to anybody. She spends a lot of time in the chapel. Often, she’ll phone me in tears, because she just wants a hug from a mum and a sister.” Kim’s father died of cancer in November 2024.
“Kim has grown into a lovely person,” Follows insists. “She’s proved that she’s not a danger to anybody. I would have her living with me tomorrow, and I would leave a very sharp knife out. She’s never going to harm anybody again. I’d put my life on it.”
For mental health problems in the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123.
Portraits by Gary Calton for The Observer
Additional photographs by PA/Alamy, Linconshire Police/PA, Alamy Stock Photo, Alamy Stock Photo, Gary Calton