4. Earth to Earth

My review of a West Country true crime classic that felt VERY close to home

In 2020 there was a murder-suicide on our family farm on Exmoor. It was in all the papers.

My close and in fact only non-Johnson neighbour within several miles John Zurick shot his wife Debbie in the back, twice, and then turned the gun on himself. They had bought the cottage I lived in as a child and from where I walked down the lane to be picked up in the garage Land Rover to go to Winsford First School.

That’s for another time, though. This is a quick post about three siblings who were found with their heads blown off in 1975, on a primitive dairy farm in the cream-tea belt between Dartmoor and Exmoor. While there should be no competition when it comes to violence nothing has ever trumped that, which is why a gripping book, a cross between Cold Comfort Farm and In Cold Blood, about the gruesome deaths of an entire generation of a Devon farming family has been reissued fifty years after the bloodbath.

I came to Earth to Earth late. I was talking about the tragedy at our farm to my neighbour and doppelgänger on the moor, the writer Rachel Campbell-Johnston (despite having COMPLETELY different names we often get each other’s letters and mail, calls from the newspapers, and invitations, it’s like a French farce, I do hope we are both keeping diaries…)

She said, that’s funny, I’ve just been sent a proof of an extraordinary book. It was John Cornwell’s classic, which won the Gold Dagger award for non-fiction days after it was published.

Anyway, I was intrigued and the publishers kindly sent me a proof. And then they kindly sent me the actual hardback, above, (addressed to “Rachel Campbell-Johnston” of course). I read it in one sitting, barely breathing. Here’s my review in this week’s Spectator (of course I should say here that readers should support print too….) but consider this a freebie from me:

I became quite obsessed by the story. It’s had a gusty second wind, with a double page spread in the Oldie and a long read in the latest FT Magazine Murder at West Chapple Farm. I kept seeing parallels between the Johnsons and the Luxtons siblings, especially as, my brother Leo once shot my brother Alexander (Boris) with an airgun. “I think you should have pursued analogies further,” Al (Boris) teased me in our group chat, especially as our father “claimed I shot Leo, while in fact Leo shot me before mysteriously failing to turn gun on himself.”

I agree. NOT FUNNY. Nor was Leo’s idea that we stage a reconstruction at the family farm over the summer. Gallows humour perhaps is best kept to WhatsApp.

More Rachel Johnson Papers as they come.