News that something terrible had happened at Epsom College began to spread among parents via WhatsApp groups last Sunday afternoon. 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.
‘People were saying that somebody was hurt,’ says one mother. ‘But nobody imagined it was going to be something as awful as this.’
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. ‘Everyone is still in shock and disbelief,’ the mother says.
‘It’s so crazy what happened. I don’t think the children can really take it in or understand how terrible it is.’
Most parents broke the news to their children on Sunday evening. Those who board at the school are believed to have been told of the triple deaths by stunned staff.
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.
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. It is a question that haunts grief-stricken relatives and those who knew and loved the family.
No one who was with the Pattisons last weekend remembers seeing anything untoward. 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. 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.
And that evening, the husband and wife hosted a small dinner party for friends with ‘no indication’ that anything was amiss.
‘Nothing unusual happened. 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.
But 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. 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.
What makes their deaths doubly shocking is that, outwardly at least, the Pattisons, who had been married for 12 years, appeared to enjoy the kind of family life to which so many aspire.
Emma was one of the most high-flying teachers in the UK and only six months into her role as Epsom College’s first ever female head. Her husband was a company director. In recent years they had spent thousands creating their dream home and landscaped garden in Caterham, Surrey, where neighbours eyed up the expensive cars on the drive.
Their only child — happy and bubbly Lettie — was being educated at a private prep school. Above all, both Emma and her husband were from close-knit, loving families who utterly adored them. Nothing, then, that might point to the horror brewing behind the scenes.
Yet it emerged this week that there had been problems in the couple’s relationship, going back several years.
In 2016, when Lettie was barely a year old, Emma was briefly arrested after her husband dialled 999 during a row at home, around midnight, alleging that she had slapped him around the face.
Two minutes later, apparently regretting the call, George Pattison dialled 999 again, this time asking officers not to come to the couple’s four-bedroom detached home because it was a ‘trivial matter and he had overreacted’.
Nevertheless, the police turned up and arrested Emma on suspicion of common assault. She was questioned, with a solicitor present, in the early hours before being released without charge.
Given her professional position — at the time she was deputy head teacher at another independent secondary school, St John’s in nearby Leatherhead — it must have been a huge relief to know that the matter wouldn’t be taken any further.
But tellingly, during their questioning, she told police that she and her husband were undergoing counselling to overcome marital problems. Among the issues, detectives were told, was Emma’s high-profile and very demanding job. Not long after that disturbing incident, in September 2016 she took a further leap up the career ladder, assuming her first headship at Croydon High School, a private day school for girls just outside London, and taking on even more responsibilities.
It was an extraordinary rise for a woman raised on a farm in Lincolnshire who, after studying French and English Literature at Leeds University, started her professional life as a graduate trainee with Thomas Cook, hoping to travel the world.
Instead, Emma Kirk, as she was then, found herself based in Bromley, South London, which — she said in a recent interview — was ‘not quite the sparkly lights of where I’d imagined I’d end up’.
The idea of teaching as an alternative career was sparked while flicking through a copy of the Times Educational Supplement in a coffee shop.
Her first teaching job was at Lutterworth College in South Leicestershire, before moving to private Caterham School in Surrey in 2005, then to Guildford High School in 2008, where she rose to become Head of Foreign Languages. She moved to St John’s School, Leatherhead, in 2012. And six years after her 2016 appointment as head of Croydon High School, Emma was propelled into one of the most coveted jobs in UK education.
She took up the £245,000-a-year post in September 2022 and in an interview with the website School Management Plus last month, she was described as ‘fresh and forward-thinking, a far cry from the traditional perception of aloof elitism in the independent sector’.