The beaming young parents cradling their newborn baby girl paints the image of a perfect family home. Debra Lewis is held in the protective arms of her proud mother while her father wraps a loving arm around his wife and they smile into the camera for a touching picture on their sofa. But behind the smiles was a simmering tension that would rip apart their family and end in murder.
Jimmy Bamsey was not the loving father he appeared to be - he was a monster who unleashed hell on his eight children and wife Wendy. In one fit of rage, he punched his wife so hard in the face that her eye came out of its socket, leaving her blind in one eye. Wendy was rushed to hospital by her neighbour who held her eyeball - hanging on by a thread - in his hand.
On another occasion, Debra watched her father grab her mother by the throat. Emboldened by fear, the teenager threatened to hit him with a fire poker if he did not remove his hands from her neck. 'If you're going to do that, you best make sure you knock me out because I'll kill you,' Bamsey snapped at his 13-year-old daughter. 'And that was what we grew up with,' Debra, now 68, recalls to The Crime Desk.
Therefore it came as little surprise to Debra when she saw a police car pull up outside her house in the middle of a stormy night in July 1971. 'I knew straight away what had happened,' she says. 'He'd gone out looking for her that night and he'd killed her on the doorstep of her own mother's house.' That night, Bamsey had stabbed his wife to death in North Cornelly, a small Welsh village rocked by such a callous attack. She was just 31. He immediately confessed to the crime, knocking on his mother-in-law's door and delivering the chilling line: 'I've killed your daughter.'
Debra revealed how her mother, trapped in an unhappy and abusive marriage, had fled Bamsey after another violent episode over an affair she was having. She took the four youngest children with her to her mother's home and left the four eldest - including Debra - with Bamsey. It was around two weeks later that Debra recalled her father 'acting very strangely' - a warning sign that he was plotting another vicious attack.
Debra went to visit her mother and her brothers but that was the last time he would see her. For two days later, Wendy - described by her daughter as a 'very attractive, dainty blonde woman' - was stabbed to death by the man who had sworn to love and protect her. 'My father said to me he was going out that night. He told me to iron him a shirt and I asked him where he was going, quite innocently, and he told me to mind my own business. He was quite sharp about it.' Bamsey had gone out that night with the sole intention of hunting his wife down. He then knifed her to death on her mother's doorstep.
While her father was prowling the streets, Debra had gone for a sleepover with her next door neighbour as there had been a huge thunderstorm which had triggered a power outage in the street. 'None of us could sleep and we were looking out the window,' she said. 'It must have been around 4am when a police car pulled up outside and my auntie got out of the police car and I knew straight away what had happened.'
What followed was a horrific chain of events which saw Debra and her siblings split up, with family members arguing over them 'like a litter of puppies'. Bamsey, who handed himself in to police, was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter, his defence being 'provocation' because Wendy had been unfaithful. But he was released after just 14 months, maintaining parental responsibility of his eight children throughout. Two of Debra's brothers were sent back to live with their murdering father, while she was forced to leave her auntie's care (on her mother's side) to go and live with her grandmother and step grandfather (on her father's side).
'It was horrendous because my step-grandfather used to molest me,' Debra heartbreakingly revealed. 'When my dad came out of prison, he'd met another woman and they moved in together. He took two of my younger brothers back to live with him. They made their lives hell. They were thrown out on the street. She used to spit in their food. They used to get beaten.' She added: 'They shouldn't have that parental responsibility, especially while they're in prison and that those children should be given a choice, not be told that he's still your father so you have to go and live with him.'
Just a couple of years later, Bamsey was back behind bars after almost beating his second wife Dianne to death in the family home. He died aged 75 in 2011. Before his death, he approached Debra for the first time in more than 10 years. 'I spoke to him because he never apologised to us for what he did,' she recalls. 'He felt sorry for himself and said "Oh, I lost the only woman I ever loved." But I said to him, "You lost the woman you loved because you killed her". Not once did he ever turn around to us kids and say he was sorry for the life that he caused for us. He genuinely never understood that.'
Estimates of how many children there are in the UK today living with a parent who killed another vary between 50 and 200 and, despite the scale of their trauma, there is no consistent system in place to identify them or ensure they receive the support they need. Campaigners are urging for the swift implementation of Jade's Law, named after Jade Ward who was murdered by her ex partner Russell Marsh in 2021. Marsh then went on to seek contact with their children from prison. Jade's Law will prevent this and bar such killers from securing custody of their kids after their release. The law was passed in May 2024 but it has still not been brought into force almost two years later.
