Pottery Cottage: Massacre at Pottery Cottage 30 years on

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It is thirty years ago since escaped prisoner Billy Hughes, in an orgy of killing, slaughtered three generations of a family at a remote cottage in the Peak District before being tracked down and shot by police. Pat Parkin recalls the horrific event which still sends shivers down the spines of local people.

Billy Hughes who ruthlessly killed three generations of a family

In January 1977, an isolated house in the Peak District was the scene of one of the most hideous crimes ever to be committed in Derbyshire. Three generations of one family were wiped out in a horrifying mass killing by escaped prisoner, Billy Hughes.

Had it been the storyline of a crime novel, no-one would have believed it.

An armed and highly dangerous criminal, on his way to a court hearing in Chesterfield, had escaped onto the snow-covered moors bordering the Chatsworth Estate after stabbing one prison officer, handcuffing him to another and then kidnapping a taxi driver, before fleeing on foot.

Local people became more and more fearful as road blocks, massive searches, including the use of two Army helicopters, produced nothing. No-one had reported seeing the fugitive who was feared to have slipped through the net or taken cover in a local property. Police called on everyone to search outbuildings and garages and take care when opening their doors to strangers.

Pottery Cottage where the murders took place

In fact, what no-one knew then was that one family was already undergoing a terrible ordeal at the hands of Hughes after he stormed into the remote cottage at Eastmoor, near Baslow.

Gill and Richard Moran, their daughter, Sarah (10) and her grandparents, Arthur and Amy Minton, were all kept prisoner in separate rooms by Hughes, while he tried to maintain an air of normality around the house so that neighbours would not be suspicious.

Richard and Gill Moran

Amy and Arthur Minton

He even allowed Mrs Minton to take the family dog for a walk and let the Morans go into Chesterfield shopping. At the same time, he forced company director Richard Moran to steal money from his own offices in the town.

Subsequently, when the full horror of the crime came to be known, people could not understand why the Morans, on those journeys, hadn’t indicated to someone what was happening. The answer will never be known but it was assumed that Hughes had threatened those who stayed behind with violence if the others sought help.

It was a risk they obviously weren’t prepared to take and, as a result, Richard, his daughter and his in-laws died, while Gill Moran was taken hostage.

When police did begin to move in on Pottery Cottage, Hughes drove off with her, only stopping when he crashed into a road block near Macclesfield in Cheshire.

Even then, Gill Moran’s nightmare did not come to an end. Hughes was armed with a gun and an axe as he bargained with police for a getaway car in exchange for her release.

The village of Rainow, on the Derbyshire-Cheshire border, where Hughes was shot dead

Eventually, he lost patience with police negotiators who were trying to talk him round, went to strike her with the axe and was promptly shot dead by a Derbyshire police marksmen who had been standing by.

What the family went through before they died, and Gill Moran suffered during that terrible ordeal, will probably never be known. Apart from a less than detailed story she told very soon afterwards to the Daily Mail, she never spoke publicly about it and was not called to give evidence at the inquests.

But the case, which had aroused worldwide interest, was constantly discussed for weeks afterwards. Prison staff and police were criticised in a government report into the escape which led to the murders.

The management and staff at Leicester Prison, where Hughes, a 30-year-old career criminal from Chesterfield, had been held before that fateful journey, were criticised for failing to search properly for a boning knife which had gone missing from the kitchen where he had worked.

It was that knife which Hughes used, a month after its disappearance, to overpower the two prison officers while they were travelling in a taxi to court.

So disturbed was the Chief Inspector of Prisons that he recommended that in future all prisoners leaving the premises for any reason should be stripped and searched. He said he recognised this might attract criticism and would be humiliating to inmates and could have an affect on relations between inmates and staff, but said he considered “the interests of security to be overriding”.

He also said insufficient information had been sent by the police to the prison about Hughes and staff were unaware of his record of violence, so he was not known to be violent.

Gill Moran, the sole survivor of the massacred family, eventually began to try to put her life back together. She went to stay in Paris for a while with her sister and later married and had a child who she called Jayne Sarah, after her first daughter.

The final scene in the terrible tragedy was played out nine years ago when Hughes’ wife, Jean, who had moved from Chesterfield to start a new life in Blackpool, took her own life, after suffering from alcoholism.

There were plans at one stage for a bust of Hughes to be exhibited in Blackpool waxworks alongside such notorious killers as Crippen, Christie, and Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, but his widow objected.

Pottery Cottage was re-named and sold in 1978 and, five years later, after much opposition, Yorkshire Television abandoned plans to make a TV film about the massacre.

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