I married a killer… I assumed he had turned over a brand new leaf – then police found one thing horrifying

Beverley Stephens was volunteering at a day centre for the down at heel in the Saltley area of Birmingham when she first met Barry Williams.

She thought he was kind with a friendly personality, a ‘regular’ man who had simply fallen on hard times.

Despite a 17-year age gap they started dating, but while Beverley, 34, was falling for her new beau, he was hiding a dark secret that would make most potential suitors run for the hills.

Williams, 51, was a convicted spree killer who had just spent 15 years in Broadmoor Hospital for executing five people in a gun rampage across the West Midlands.

He was incarcerated at Broadmoor for a horrifying rampage that saw him shoot dead three of his neighbours in West Bromwich before driving 20 miles to Nuneaton where he executed an innocent couple at random, in October 1978. 

Williams was back on the streets after doctors deemed he no longer posed a danger to the public and was freed on the orders of Secretary of State Michael Howard.

He came clean to Beverley about his horrifying crimes and incredibly their romance blossomed. When the five-times killer proposed a year into their relationship, she said yes.

It begs the question, how could any woman ever marry a man capable of such evil?

In an exclusive interview with The Crime Desk, Beverley said: ‘He told me everything [about his past] from the start. Everything. He was truthful with me so I thought I would give him a chance.

‘I think the fact he was honest put me at ease. I never felt scared around him in the beginning.’

Within a year the couple were married in a shotgun wedding at the city’s registry office in early 1996, with their daughter Amy being born months later.

Speaking about their early life together, Beverley told the Mail: ‘That term shotgun wedding is somewhat ironic really, given his crimes. 

‘But [when they met] he was kind and just seemed like a pleasant, regular man.

‘He wasn’t violent then. He just liked a quiet life.’

Williams settled into domestic life and distanced himself from his shocking past, changing his name to Harry Street so his family could avoid the ignominy of being associated with a five-time killer.

In 2005, the family of three moved into a council house in Birmingham’s Hall Green suburb. But despite the scenes of domestic bliss, behind the net curtains of his terraced home Williams was a ticking timebomb.

Williams went on to form another obsession with next-door neighbours that would result in years of torment, a homemade bomb, a hidden arsenal of weapons, and the bomb squad swooping in on the quiet suburban street.

But nine years previously, there had been no hint of Street’s mental instability when Beverley met him.

She said her sister was less charitable, urging her not to marry the killer, while her parents remained neutral and accepted it was her decision.

But Beverley now admits that in retrospect, the warning signs about her new husband were there from the start.

She told the Mail: ‘He wouldn’t take his meds. He said he didn’t need it. He had a doctor and a social worker who would come to check on him and the doctor would try to persuade him to take the medicine, but he just wouldn’t be told.’

She said Street refused to look for work and insisted that she didn’t find a job either. Instead the couple survived on benefits, enjoying the odd modest holiday with their daughter to Welsh seaside resorts such as Llandudno or Rhyl where Street had been with his own mother.

It was five or six years into their marriage when Street’s violent streak started to surface and Beverley said she eventually found herself taking tablets for anxiety as a coping mechanism.

‘He started to become aggressive towards me’, Beverley said. ‘His demeanour would suddenly change – I’d see the aggression in his face.

‘He hit me once – we had a disagreement and he just went for me.

‘He was capable of just going off like a rocket.

‘Another time something happened and I crawled under the kitchen table to get away from him and he grabbed me by the hair to pull me out.

‘Amy happened to be coming down the stairs at the time, which led into the kitchen. She shouted ‘leave my mum alone’ at him and that snapped him out of it.’

Beverley, 64, who now lives elsewhere in Birmingham with her second husband, Alan, said she eventually learnt what could trigger Street’s violent rages, such as being woken up. She learned that one the hard way, after she following him to bed one night and inadvertently disturbed him.

‘He put a pillow over my face as a result of that’, she said. ‘I couldn’t breathe. It was very scary.’

On another occasion Street got annoyed at how much time she had spent browsing during a shopping expedition in the neighbouring King’s Heath suburb of Birmingham.

‘When we got back to the car, I could sense he was tense’, she added. ‘Once we had driven out of King’s Heath he stopped the car and ordered me out. I had to walk home.

‘He was not like that every day. Sometimes he could be kind. He’d buy me things, and try to get Amy what she wanted. But the episodes of violence and volatility got worse as time went on. He started not enjoying life I think.’

She recalled him once crafting a silencer for a gun in the living room as she busied herself in the kitchen, but would tell her to stop asking questions if she queried what he was up to.

Beverley said she couldn’t explain what led Street to become fixated with their next-door neighbour Warren Smith and his wife Sharee.

‘I remember Harry made a gun gesture with his fingers at Warren once’, she said. ‘He said something like ‘I’ll sort you out’.

‘There were times when I didn’t want to go home to him’, she added. ‘But I always did because I felt like that was the best way of keeping him calm.

‘Sometimes I thought about running away with Amy. It was in my mind to do it a few times but I thought he would find us.’

Beverley was wise to fear Street might track them down, because that is exactly what he went on to do to Mr and Mrs Smith after they eventually sold up and moved to a different neighbourhood in a bid to escape him.

The Smiths had moved into Hazelville Road five years before the Streets, believing they had found their ‘forever’ home.

Initially, they thought their new next-door neighbours seemed pleasant enough, if slightly aloof.

But then the complaints started.

Street accused the Smiths of holding noisy parties and began calling the police to complain about noise or make false allegations of domestic violence.

When officers failed to act, Street decided to take matters into his own hands.

For five years he mounted a campaign of harassment against the innocent Smith family, warning them: ‘You will be ghosts’.

He drilled holes in the walls of his bedroom so he could bang metal rods against the adjoining wall.

Street also hurled golf balls onto their conservatory roof, as well as bread to attract birds.

Matters came to a head in November 2010 when Street leaned over the fence during a family garden party brandishing an air weapon, warning Mr Smith, 45,: ‘You don’t know who I am.’

It proved the final straw for the Smiths, who put their house on the market – eventually selling it at a loss of £25,000 in July 2013.

But three months later, the then 69-year-old Street turned up at their new house ‘snarling like a canine’ after spotting their car on the driveway. He knocked on the door and crowed: ‘I have found you. I know where you live.’

The terrified Smiths rang the police, who swooped on Street’s family home to arrest him four days later.

What they found inside was jaw-dropping. Street had amassed an ‘arsenal’ of weapons including six guns and more than 50 home-made bullets.

Even more chillingly he had created an improvised explosive device made up of 30 grams of gunpowder, a gas canister and a viable fuse.

Army bomb disposal officers were called and hundreds of residents evacuated from a 100m zone while the IED was made safe.

On the day of his arrest in October 2013 Street was planning to take his wife and daughter on a trip to a cottage in Wales that he’d booked – and Beverley told the Mail she feared he might have been planning to rig an explosion in the loft while they were away in a bid to destroy the neighbouring property and any occupants inside.

She revealed Street had spent the preceding weeks going up and down from the loft, but batted away her questions about what he was up to.

‘I knew there was something wrong’, Beverley, who said she knew about her husband’s fascination with guns, added. 

‘He was insisting we go to this cottage and was hurrying me up to pack. He kept saying we’d just need a few jumpers each, but I was thinking “why are we going to Wales in October? It will be cold”.

‘Something didn’t feel right and I was going to call the police, but luckily enough that very day they came knocking on the door because they were investigating a harassment complaint against the neighbours.

‘They took him away to the police station to be questioned – and he didn’t come back.’

West Midlands Police had no record of Street on their database and his previous identity only came to light after suspicious beat PC Annie Yorke made ‘extensive checks’, which led her to Street’s GP.

What she learned about his previous crimes – sparked by falling out with neighbours over noise – prompted her to ring the Smiths in a panic to warn them: ‘Get out of the house immediately.’

While mental health teams, his GP and his wife knew Street’s real identity was Barry Williams, the police or those living around him had remained in the dark.

His previous permanent address? Broadmoor.

As Williams, he spent 15 years in the high-security hospital alongside the likes of Peter Sutcliffe and Ronnie Kray from 1979, over the double shooting which left five dead and two others seriously injured.

Williams, then 34, had spent years arguing with next-door neighbours the Burkitts on West Bromwich’s Bustleholme estate.

The foundry worker had a firearms certificate for a semi-automatic weapon he used legitimately at gun club range, where he was nicknamed The Cowboy.

When he emerged from his house one evening in October 1978 and thought George Burkitt, 47, and his son Philip, 20, were laughing at him, he snapped – pulling out a Smith and Wesson handgun and blasting the pair as they worked on their Triumph Spitfire on the driveway. 

He then went inside the house and fired on Philip’s typist mum Iris, 48, killing her instantly, and his 17-year-old sister, Jill, who was hit seven times but miraculously survived.

Drunken Williams then jumped into his Ford Capri, shooting neighbours Judith and Joe Chambers – who also survived – as he drove off.

He eventually turned up at a petrol station in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, owned by Michele Di Maria, 58, and wife Elizabetta, 53. He shot the Italian-born couple dead in their kiosk when they refused his demands for cash.

He was arrested the next day in Buxton, Derbyshire, in front of 100 children queuing to watch Grease at a cinema, following a 30-mile, 100mph police chase across the Peak District. Inside his car were more than 900 live bullet cartridges.

In interviews Williams told detectives: ‘You would have shot the Burkitts if you’d been me. They weren’t human beings – they were things. They wouldn’t shut up, so I shut them up.’

The sentencing judge at Stafford Crown Court said Williams could only be released by order of the Secretary of State.

He was freed in 1994 after doctors said he was ‘no longer deemed a danger to the public’, prompting a public outcry.

Incredibly he was initially housed in a bail hostel in Birmingham, before stints in North Wales, Kidderminster and Hereford.

Then after meeting Beverley he again put down roots in the West Midlands, changed his name and ultimately became fixated on his next-door neighbours once more.

He spent much of his time at home in the walk-in cupboard off the lounge, where he spent hours adapting blank firing weapons and building homemade bullets – using an Argos catalogue as target practice.

Street blocked the cupboard off with a sofa and banned his wife and daughter from entering it.

Prosecutor Michael Duck QC told Birmingham Crown Court in October 2014 that Street’s fixation with the Smith family ‘became something of a preoccupation, as it had been many years before’.

A judge said the risk of another tragedy was only averted by a ‘narrow margin’ as he ordered Street to again be detained indefinitely.

He died of a heart attack at Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital two months later, on Christmas Eve 2014.

A multi-agency review was set up to establish why there was no record of Street’s previous convictions on police computer systems.

Warren Smith will never forget his nightmare neighbour – and how close he came to possibly being his next victim.

Speaking after Street’s death, he said: ‘We were very, very lucky as I know that something was about to happen before his arrest.

‘That monster should never have been released. We are lucky to be alive.’