On Thursday, February 19, 2015 16-year-old Becky Watts was re-sitting for her GCSEs, or General Certificate of Secondary Education, which is an academic qualification in various subjects that take place in the UK starting in Year 9 or 10. It’s more than likely that as she sat for the exams, she was exhausted since the night before, Becky had been out, having fun with friends & hadn’t slept at all.
In the hours before her exam, Becky had been socializing at a local rugby club & then stayed up the rest of the night playing computer games & watching movies with a friend.
Before she headed out for her exams, she texted her 18-year-old boyfriend, Luke Oberhansli: I love you so much. Luke messaged her back a little after 11 am to let her know he’d gotten home & Becky replied, GOODIE XXX with a heart & kiss-blowing emoji. When Luke responded to this text only minutes later, he never received a reply from Becky.
Those who knew Becky described her as a young girl who was looking forward to her future. However, life had not always been easy for Becky & the road to where she was at this time was a difficult one. Becky had an older brother, Daniel & the two were very close. When she was 3-years-old, Becky’s parents, Darren Galsworthy & Tanya Watts, broke up & she eventually transitioned to living with her father & his new partner, Anjie as well as Anjie’s son, Nathan Matthews, in Bristol, England. In April 2014, Darren & Anjie went on to marry in a ceremony where Nathan served as the best man.
During her early life, Becky lived with her mother, Tanya, but transitioned to living with her father when there were questions of neglect. During her time in primary school, she was painfully shy & struggled with separation anxiety to the point that she didn’t want to leave Anjie’s side. To alleviate the matter, Anjie went to school with Becky each day & worked as an unpaid classroom helper so she could help alleviate her step-daughter’s anxieties.
As Becky moved on to secondary school, things became even more harrowing when classmates started to tease the young girl about her weight. By age 13, Becky had developed anorexia nervosa & her weight dropped to an alarming 84#/38 kg. As time went on, Becky refused to go to school & transitioned to home schooling. The family waded through what were described as very dark times & thankfully, with the help of professionals, Darren indicated that they were able to get our Becky back.
As time went on, Becky’s confidence slowly grew & she began to come into her own, growing more & more independent as the years went by. She grew to love fashion & with that, her collection of clothing began to grow with her boots, trainers, shoes & makeup stacked neatly in her bedroom. Becky loved music, animals & watching movies with friends at the cinema.
Becky’s maternal grandmother, Patricia Watts, described her granddaughter as a faultless girl who was loyal, funny & sensible. Her mother, Tanya, indicated that Becky worked tirelessly to be sure that her parents maintained an amicable relationship after their divorce. She saw her daughter as someone who was a caring, kind, normal, happy girl. Although, like most teens or any human, for that matter, Becky did have her moods which often clashed with her father & her stepmother.
Becky’s stepbrother Nathan was 28-years-old at the time her father married Anjie in 2014. He worked as a takeaway driver after failing a course to become an electrician. He was described as someone that was always good for a laugh & a joke.
Nathan didn’t live with Becky as he was with his 21-year-old girlfriend, Shauna Hoare, living in a housing association terraced home in Bristol. Shauna was described as quiet but hardworking & since Anjie suffered from multiple sclerosis, Shauna served as her caregiver.
From the outside, the relationship between Nathan & Shauna appeared to be a normal one, but like many things in life, things weren’t always what they seemed. Under the surface, Nathan was hiding a secret obsession with pornography, with a disturbing focus on teen girls. At the time the couple began dating, Shauna was only 14 or 15-years-old while Nathan was in his early twenties.
As Thursday, February 19, 2015 continued on, Becky’s boyfriend, Luke, realized that she had stopped responding to his text messages. The last response he received from her was at 11 am, so he wrote back, Becky oi & Hello, but these texts went unanswered. By 4 pm the next day, when family & friends still couldn’t find Becky, she was reported missing.
At the time of her disappearance, no one was aware that Nathan & Shauna were hiding behind a facade & harbored disturbing sexual fantasies. In the weeks before, the two exchanged text messages & viewed material that suggested that they had a shared unnatural interest in attractive teenage females. They exchanged intimate messages where they discussed kidnapping petite girls. They watched pornography that depicted teenage girls dressed as schoolgirls as well as threesomes.
Their fantasies began to morph into reality when only observing their dark fantasies was no longer enough. Soon, the couple persuaded a friend to join them in a threesome & in February, little did Becky know, but Nathan intended to use her as what the prosecution would later refer to as a sexual plaything. This, paired with what was later revealed as their shared, deep-rooted hatred of Becky, led Nathan & Shauna to Becky’s home.
On the Thursday that Becky was taking her exams, Nathan came home prepared to bring his dark, sick fantasies to life as he assembled a kidnap kit. The red suitcase included a stun-gun, handcuffs, a mask, tape & black garbage bags. He later admitted that he assembled these items so he could kidnap Becky because he wanted to scare her. He was fully aware that his mom was leaving the house at 11:15 am that day to go to a medical appointment so he took his opportunity.
While Shauna stood outside, smoking a cigarette in the garden, Nathan knocked on Becky’s door & immediately jumped into action & began placing tape over her mouth. He warned her, As long as you do as you’re told, you are going to be fine. As Becky was placed in handcuffs, Nathan tried to wrestle her body into the suitcase. Becky was not going to go down without a fight & began to resist in attempts to wriggle away to safety. This turned into a violent struggle & the 28-year-old used his hands to restrict her breathing which ultimately led to Becky’s death.
Nathan later told the courts that soon, he could no longer hear his stepsister breathing & when he checked for a pulse, there was none. After her death, Becky was stabbed fifteen times in the abdomen & they placed her body inside the suitcase. Despite the violent, horrific murder of his 16-year-old stepsister, Nathan & Shauna took Becky’s body back to their home where it remained in the trunk of their car & they ordered take out & played a game of Monopoly. Clearly unbothered by what they had just done, the next day, they sang & laughed over a parody of the song, Do You Want to Build a Snowman from Frozen & instead of the correct lyrics, they sang, Do You Want to Hide a Body?
Nathan & Shauna’s next moves were absolutely horrific when they made the decision to dismember Becky’s body with the use of a circular saw. Once complete, they packed her remains in plastic & salt & hid them in a garden shed.
Nathan had no relationship with his father & the space for the man’s name on his birth certificate is blank. He was raised by his grandmother, Margaret May & her husband, Christopher, in the village of Warmley in south Gloucestershire. As he reached his teenage years, he spent much of his time isolated in his bedroom alone, even eating the majority of his meals there. It was at this point his obsession with porn began & by the time Becky was murdered, Nathan was viewing sexual images on a near-daily basis. As he entered adulthood & was unable to pass the course to become an electrician, he moved on to delivering pizzas for Dominos, working for Sainsbury’s grocery store & delivering Chinese food.
From a young age, he suffered from widespread pain as a result of fibromyalgia which led to the development of anxiety & depression. A friend indicated that his illness made him feel inadequate & useless & Nathan admitted that he had anger issues. Upon his arrest, he described himself to police as emotionally unstable, psychologically disturbed.. A caveman.
Despite his mental & physical health struggles, Nathan went on to join the Territorial Army where he worked as a part-time soldier, learning survival & organizational skills. His anger issues, however, prevented him from becoming a reliable soldier as he would easily snap. His colleagues recall the terror they felt while driving with him; if he was in an angry mood, it would be reflected in his erratic driving.
Meanwhile, Shauna Hoare’s life began on rocky ground. She was in the foster system as a young child until age thirteen when she moved back in with her birth mother, Lisa Donovan, who had seven other children. Only a year or so later, she met & started a relationship with Nathan. Because of the age gap, Shauna, as young as fourteen while Nathan was in his twenties, Lisa was not pleased with the relationship & saw him as flirty, sexually orientated & domineering. If Shauna asked him for anything, he would ask for a sexual favor in return.
Shauna moved out to a hostel that was owned by Bristol city council & she allowed Nathan to live with her which was against the rules of her arrangement. She abruptly cut ties with her mother after Nathan had a terrible argument with Lisa. As the argument ended, Nathan threatened Lisa that she would never see her daughter again. Soon, the couple moved to the house they were living in at the time of Becky’s murder in the Barton Hill area of Bristol, only a couple miles from where Darren, Anjie & Becky lived in St. George.
Around this time, the couple began spending more & more time with the Galsworthys & Becky. Shauna became a registered carer for Anjie & a bizarre love-hate relationship began with Becky.
During the trial, both Nathan & Shauna indicated that they weren’t fond of how Becky treated Anjie & Darren, believing her to be self-centered & manipulative.
Before her murder, Becky had told a number of friends that she was afraid of Nathan & according to her best friend, Courtney Bicker, Nathan had previously given Becky graphic detail as to how he would kill her, once suggesting that he would batter her with a sledgehammer. Becky had even confided in a child psychologist that she was fearful for her life.
After her murder, it was discovered that Nathan had been sexually fixated with Becky from as far back as when she was only 8-years-old & he was about twenty. At that time, she reported that he touched her inappropriately through her clothing. In the months before her death, relatives noticed that Nathan had been in the habit of hiding & leaping out as Becky walked by to scare her. When he managed to startle her, causing her to scream, he would be doubled over in hysterics.
Meanwhile, at the home that Nathan & Shauna shared, Shauna indicated that he was physically violent toward her, once pulling her by the hair on their bed & strangling her for four to five seconds. During the trial, she indicated that she was panicked & unable to breathe.
According to Shauna, Nathan also played psychological games with her, calling her fat despite her slim, petite stature. He disliked the fact that she was smoking & she was forced to beg for food & pay him for cigarettes. Many times she felt like he was trying to act like a father figure in an attempt to control every aspect of her life. She said that he briefly allowed her to take college courses but forced her to stop when he accused her of befriending other men.
On the other hand, those that were close with Nathan blame Shauna for the state of their relationship & his grandmother, Margaret, believed that his mental health deteriorated as his relationship with Shauna progressed. She viewed her as a dominant girl who caused Nathan to become paranoid.
During the trial, Nathan admitted that he was often fearful that Shauna would leave him & at one point, when she threatened to leave, he stabbed himself with a fork & violently scratched his own face. At the time of Becky’s murder, the couple was spending much of their time isolated & holed up in the filthy home they shared. They spent the majority of their days in bed to the point that they located a toaster & a kettle directly next to the bed so they didn’t have to get up to eat or drink.
Investigators believe that the twisted bond that kept the couple together & led them to kill was sex. Professor of criminology at Birmingham City University believes that the couple were gripped by a mental condition known as folie à deux or madness of two. The fantasy began around the idea of a threesome & ended with a sexually motivated attack & murder.
Nathan insisted that he had no sexual interest in Becky & only killed her when his plot to kidnap her to teach her a lesson for mistreating his mother went wrong. Shauna claimed to know nothing of the plan, the murder or the aftermath.
Becky’s body was discovered on Monday, March 2, eleven days after she was last seen or heard from, in a garden shed owned by friends of Nathan & Shauna, Karl Demetrius & Jaydene Parsons, who later admitted to assisting Nathan. They indicated that he offered them £10,000 to assist him.
Investigators found the 16-year-old girl’s remains dismembered, packaged up in cling film & wrapped in grocery bags as well as bath mats & a shower curtain, hidden inside a suitcase. When everything was tied back to Nathan, he insisted that Shauna had nothing to do with any part of it.
Becky’s body had over forty bruises as well as nineteen knife wounds & fifteen stab wounds & a slash wound to the torso, long cuts down her chest & wounds to her shoulders, all of which were inflicted after death. Based on the defensive wounds to her body, it was clear that Becky had fought for her life. The medical examiner determined that her cause of death was suffocation before her body was dismembered into eight parts.
A circular saw, a kitchen knife & a cross-headed screwdriver were the tools used in the dismemberment & each of the eight body parts had been wrapped in multiple layers of bags & three types of tape. Her torso was wrapped in two bath mats, a shower curtain & a ‘It’s My Birthday’ bag from Wacky Warehouse. Because her body parts had been wrapped in so many layers, the pathologist indicated that it had the effect of preserving the body. The use of table salt also acted to preserve the body.
Nathan indicated that when he knocked on Becky’s door, he wore a mask over his face as a way to scare her & during the struggle, the mask slipped down so he decided to strangle his stepsister who stood at only 5’1” while Shauna was in the garden. The medical examiner indicated that there were no findings to support strangulation & instead, it’s likely that her mouth & nose had been covered, resulting in suffocation.
Nathan admitted that after he killed Becky, he placed her body in the trunk of his car & drove it to his house on Cotton Mill Lane in Bristol & dismembered her body in his bathtub. During a police interview, before he confessed to the murder, he said that he didn’t particularly like his stepsister, saying that she could be rude or demanding.
By the next day, both he & Shauna were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping Becky. When officers arrived at the home they shared, Nathan was playing video games & initially refused to acknowledge their arrival, answering no comment when asked about his stepsister’s safety.
He later made comments to authorities about Becky which led investigators to the property where they ultimately located her body parts inside the shed. It was at 1 am on March 3, 2015 that a detective found a clenched human hand wrapped in cling wrap. At this point, 30-year-old Karl Demetrius & his partner, 23-year-old Jaydene Parsons admitted to assisting an offender.
After Becky initially disappeared, Nathan & Shauna went on with their days as if nothing was amiss as the family was in a panic about her whereabouts. Nathan later indicated that he didn’t reveal what had happened to his stepsister in order to protect them from the terrible truth.
When Anjie came back from her doctor’s appointment, Becky wasn’t home but she didn’t worry because Nathan & Shauna told her that they heard a door slamming & assumed that Becky had left to go out. By the next day, when she still hadn’t come home & no one had heard from her, worry set in. At about 4 pm that day, Becky was reported missing.
The police started their investigation at the house & found that Becky’s phone, laptop & tablet were missing, but her money & spare clothing had been left behind.
An online campaign was started following Becky’s disappearance with the hashtag #FindBecky that reached more than 2 million people worldwide. Darren gave a public statement that touched the hearts of those watching, tears pouring down his face as he begged for Becky to return home, not yet knowing that his little girl would never be coming home alive.
Police canvassed the area & conducted door-to-door inquiries with no luck. It was the disinterest that both Nathan & Shauna showed that raised their suspicions & Nathan avoided contact with the police, evading interrogations, reluctant to provide a statement. It wasn’t until investigators located a bloodstain in Becky’s room & forensic tests were conducted which determined a DNA match to Nathan.
During the search of Nathan & Shauna’s home, investigators located a receipt that listed the purchase of a circular saw, a face mask & goggles that was dated the same day that Becky vanished. Review of CCTV footage obtained from B&Q where the items were purchased, showed Nathan shopping for the times in question.
Knowing that he had been backed into a corner, Nathan admitted to kidnapping his stepsister, but argued that he’d had no intention of killing her. He claimed to have only wanted to scare her because of the disrespect she showed their parents & in the process, he accidentally strangled her to death.
The fact that he had come to her house prepared with a kidnap kit painted the picture of far more sinister intentions. It’s theorized that when Becky refused to participate in whatever sexual games Nathan had in mind, Nathan was enraged & suffocated Becky to death, then moved on to stabbing her in the abdomen fifteen times despite the fact that she was already deceased. The following day, they dismembered her body, packed her remains in salt & hid them in a garden shed.
Investigators later discovered that Shauna had searched do you want to hide a body on YouTube one day after Becky was killed although she claims she was only searching for a parody of a song from Disney’s Frozen.
It was early on in the investigation that Nathan was identified as the prime suspect in the case despite the fact that the search of his home revealed no traces of Becky’s DNA or blood. It was Nathan’s fingerprint that was discovered in a spot of Becky’s blood on the doorframe to her bedroom. Investigators used this knowledge as a tactic to put pressure on Nathan during formal police interviews.
Following the discovery of Becky’s body parts, Nathan & Shauna were charged with her murder.
The trial began in October 2015 & both Nathan & Shauna maintained the story that Shauna had not been involved in any part of what happened, even after her DNA was found in the bags that contained Becky’s remains. Nathan pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but refused to admit that he murdered his stepsister, maintaining that he only wanted to scare her.
The trial lasted five weeks & the jury deliberated for three hours & twenty-seven minutes. Nathan Matthews was found guilty of murder & Shauna Hoare was found guilty of manslaughter. They were also convicted of conspiracy to kidnap, perverting the course of justice, preventing lawful burial of a body & possessing two unlicensed stun guns.
In November 2015, Nathan was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 33 years & Shauna was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Their attempts at appeals were denied.
Karl Demetrius & Jayden Parsons were both jailed for assisting an offender despite their claims that they were unaware of what the packages contained.
Shauna was released from prison in September 2023 after serving only half of her sentence. Becky’s mother, Tanya, had been dreading the day of the woman’s release. She believed that Shuana had betrayed her daughter’s trust in the worst possible way & at not even 30-years-old, she was free to live her life which was something Becky was robbed of.
Despite the fact that it was Anjie’s son who was responsible for the violent death & desecration of his daughter’s remains, Darren has stood by Anjie’s side during the aftermath of Becky’s murder. Anjie has spoken out about how devastated she is over her son’s actions, saying, All I want is five minutes with him to look me in the eye & tell me why. She admits that she still loves her son, but not the monster he turned into.
Darren has been very outspoken about his desire to see Nathan & Shauna pay for what they did to his beloved daughter. He’s admitted that since his daughter’s murder, he has struggled greatly & harbors tremendous guilt that he was at work & not there to protect her.
Rebecca “Becky” Marie Watts was laid to rest at Avon Cemetery St. George in Bristol, England On April 17, 2015. Darren Galsworthy spoke of his daughter, Becky has left a huge void in our lives. We all loved you so much & as you look down from heaven just look at what your short life has achieved – not bad for a shy girl. You will forever be in our hearts & thoughts, rest in peace angel of Bristol.
References:
- Wikipedia: GCSE
- The Guardian: Nathan Matthews & Shauna Hoare: Dark fantasies became reality
- Independent: Becky Watts’s body ‘was cut into eight parts & put in Asda carrier bags’
- Medium: How a couple obsessed with pornography brutally murdered boyfriend’s younger sister
- The Guardian: Becky Watts: A shy girl who was growing in confidence
- The Guardian: Becky Watts: Case review finds eight services failed murdered teenager
- Cosmopolitan: What happened to Becky Watts, the teenager murdered by her stepbrother & his girlfriend
- The Sun: In Cold Blood – What happened in the murder of Becky Watts, when was she killed by her stepbrother Nathan Matthews & what did her dad say about it?
- Bristol Live: Shauna Hoare released from prison eight years after manslaughter of Becky Watts
