She arrived at Emma's grace-and-favour head teacher house on the edge of Epsom College's vast grounds just after 1am to find her sister, niece and brother-in-law dead. There were no arguments, no indication he would go on to do something so horrific a short time later,' a friend of the family claimed this week.īut around midnight, Emma made a distressed phone call to her sister Deborah, who jumped into her car and drove from her home in south-east London. They were 'silent' and 'straight-faced' according to one who saw them, but he says he didn't read anything sinister into it at the time.Īnd that evening, the husband and wife hosted a small dinner party for friends with 'no indication' that anything was amiss. Earlier on that bright, chilly day last Saturday, the family were seen walking alongside the River Mole near a picturesque area in nearby Cobham known as The Tilt. No one who was with the Pattisons last weekend remembers seeing anything untoward. It is a question that haunts grief-stricken relatives and those who knew and loved the family. While Surrey police investigations into this horrific murder-suicide continue, in due course an inquest will be opened by the county's coroner, who will want to know what made 39-year-old Durham University graduate and chartered accountant George Pattison shoot his 45-year-old wife and daughter before turning his shotgun on himself. While assemblies were held and counselling was offered to all pupils on Monday and Tuesday, a decision was made to bring half-term forward and the school has been closed since Wednesday. Those who board at the school are believed to have been told of the triple deaths by stunned staff.Įpsom College head Emma Pattison, 45, her husband George, 39, and their seven-year-old daughter Lettie Most parents broke the news to their children on Sunday evening. I don't think the children can really take it in or understand how terrible it is.' 'Everyone is still in shock and disbelief,' the mother says. It was an email from the chair of the college's board of governors, later that evening, which brought news of a tragedy so unfathomable that the school community is still struggling to process it: the bodies of head teacher Emma Pattison, her husband George and their seven-year-old daughter, Lettie, had been found on school grounds. 'But nobody imagined it was going to be something as awful as this.' 'People were saying that somebody was hurt,' says one mother. Pupils arriving back from a trip spotted police cars and cordons around the head teacher's house, and before long messages were pinging amid concerns about what was happening at the prestigious £45,000-a-year private school.
News that something terrible had happened at Epsom College began to spread among parents via WhatsApp groups last Sunday afternoon.
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