True Crime Database

Brian Blackwell

Merseyside has been home to some of the most horrific crimes in British history, including the abduction and murder of toddler James Bulger at the hands of two ten year old boys (Jon Venables and Robert Thompson) and the killing of Michelle Quy at the hands of her husband and father of her children Mitchell Quy. The horrific murders committed by 18 year old Brian Blackwell is just another of a long list of crimes from within that area.

Brian Blackwell was born in 1986 to his father Sydney Blackwell and his mother Jacqueline Blackwell. The couple were relatively old when they had Brian and had no other children, meaning Brian received unlimited attention from them. He was considered to be very gifted academically, receiving high grades and planning to attend medical school to become a doctor. He played tennis in his spare time – classmates of his described Blackwell as being confident, an obvious extrovert, but very cocky and arrogant and loved to revel in his brilliance.

His parents, while growing up, liked to have an amount of control over Brian's life – they were rather ensure that Brian would spend a lot of his free time around them or people their own age rather than people from school or his generation and would play tennis at a local gym with his dad rather than meeting up with his friends. Another example of this sort of control in Brian's life is when he was accepted into two universities: Edinburgh and Nottingham – Brian wanted to attend Nottingham but his parents preferred Edinburgh, as they thought the city was better, and pulled some strings to get his acceptance changed, which angered Brian immensely.

As Brian continued to get older, he developed a habit for lying and deceit, a habit which would come around to bite him in the future. This further accelerated into complete fantasies about his life upon first having a girlfriend – Amal Saba, who he was originally friends with before they started dating, was an innocent girl, who believed all the lies Brian told her. Some of the lies he told was that he was a professional tennis player, sponsored by Nike (7,000 a year) and various other sporting companies and that he was playing tennis matches all over the world and earning large expenses. To prove this, he would often buy her lavish gifts, including a car and a ring. To pay for this, he stole money from his parents and applied for credit cards in his father's name: he had ordered 13 credit cards in total.

On July 25th 2004, after being confronted about the money laundering and identity theft by his parents and them planning to put an end to a lavish holiday that he was planning for his girlfriend, Brian was consumed with rage. He bludgeoned and stabbed both of his parents in the frenzy, then left the house. He did not tell Amal about his secret, but continued on with their holiday as planned and headed straight for New York, where they stayed in presidential suites at expensive hotels, shopped on fifth avenue and died at expensive restaurants.

When they returned home on August 12th, neighbours were surprised to see the couple had returned without his parents, assuming they'd all gone on holiday as a family – Brian said his parents were actually on holiday in Spain. He visited the house multiple times, where his parents bodies still lay, decomposing by the day. In the meantime, he was staying at his girlfriend's parent's house until their "return". He received straight A grades for his A-Levels and was on course to start a degree in medicine at Nottingham in October.

However, that did not last. On September 5th, neighbours, who were trying to deliver the couple some mail that was left on the porch, they noticed that the windows of the house were actually covered with flies and there was a nasty smell when they opened the hatch of the letterbox. Concerned, they rang the police, who discovered the bodies. Because of their state of decomposition, police had a difficult time determining the cause of death, initially believing it to be gunshot wounds.

They notified Brian as soon as the victims were identified and he was questioned. Although he originally seemed to pull off the facade of him being shocked and having no idea, he asked an odd question to detectives: he asked if it is cold in prison. This caused a great deal of suspicion to start surrounding Brian. He was arrested and along came a series of intense investigation, stating that he felt remorse, how much he missed his parents and how sorry he was.

He was originally charged with murder and was due to plead guilty. However, those charges were dropped and he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility following the discovery and diagnosis of his NPD – Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Symptoms of NPD include: grandiose sense of self-importance, living in a fantasy world which supports the illusion of their grandeur, needing constant compliments and praise, sense of entitlement, exploitation of others with lack of guilt or shame, often demeans and belittles others that they consider inferior. Sufferers of the disease can often act out in a fit of rage upon their plans, having been so carefully thought of, being tampered with, which detectives believe may have been the cause behind the slaughter of his parents.

Brian was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 29th 2005 – his ambitions of becoming a doctor, having a successful career, obtaining a girlfriend/wife and having his own family had been squandered from that point forward.