A son who murdered his alcoholic father in a fit of rage as a teenager this week spoke out about the horror crime for the first time.
Luke Onyett said he snapped and knifed his dad to death after being belittled and goaded by him during a drinking binge on Boxing Day in 2003.
Although the 39-year-old says he feels guilt every day about the horrific attack, he joined a harrowing roll call of Brits who have murdered their parents.
Last month wannabe school shooter Nicholas Prosper was jailed for at least 49 years for gunning down his mother and siblings inside their Luton flat.
Meanwhile, Virginia McCullough was locked up for life in October for killing her parents and stashing their bodies in the bedroom of their Essex home for four years.
Here takes a look at some of the chilling stories of Brits who have murdered their parents with hammers, knives and guns and explores the reasons why they snapped.
Luke Onyett
Luke Oynett was just 18-years-old when he stabbed his father Michael Onyett to death in a fit of rage during a drinking binge.
The now 39-year-old from Kent said he just snapped after being belittled and goaded by his body building champion father.
Oynett plunged a knife four times into his leg at a flat in Gravesend, with one of the wounds severing a main artery in his thigh.
The teenager initially picked up a chair and threw it at his father, before reaching for a knife on the draining board.
Speaking to KentOnline this week, Oynett said: ‘I do remember the build up, arguing and then my father pushing me and me flying across the room because he was a bigger lad than me.
‘I hit a wicker chair and I threw it at him which he brushed aside. I looked up and there was something on the draining board so I grabbed that and he was goading me saying ‘go on then, go on’ and pointing to his chest.
‘I put it in his leg instead and then I just blacked out and the next thing I remember properly after that is the police being there.’
Oynett was abandoned by his mother at the age of 12 and was left to live with his alcoholic father who would often spend the nights out drinking.
He soon to turned to drink himself and experienced a number of behavioural problems at school.
Oynett was jailed for murder in 2004 but was considered for parole after 12 years.
Virginia McCullough
Virginia McCullough murdered both her parents in cold blood in 2019, before storing their bodies in the bedroom upstairs and helping herself to £150,000 in their name.
The 36-year-old killed John and Lois McCullough, 70 and 71, after she racked up £60,000 in debts while pretending she had a full-time job as a web designer.
McCullough planned the crime for several months before she slipped prescription medicine into their drinks in June 2019, killing her father in his sleep.
She then battered her mother with a hammer the next day before stabbing her eight times.
Afterwards, McCullough bundled her loving parents’ bodies up into sleeping bags and barricaded them away for four and a half years in a wardrobe and a makeshift tomb fashioned like a bed.
The couple, who had raised her from birth, were in such a state of decomposition when they were discovered that they could only be identified via dental records.
Shocking body-worn camera footage revealed the moment that justice finally caught up with her.
The ‘compulsive liar’ can be heard telling officers as she was arrested for murder: ‘Dad’s body is in there, mum’s in the wardrobe.’
In October, a judge sentenced McCullough to a minimum of 36 years in prison for the horrific crime.
Nicholas Prosper
Teen gunman Nicholas Prosper was jailed for 49 years last month for gunning down his mother and two siblings in their family home.
The wannabe school shooter had also planned a massacre at his former primary school but was stopped on the way by police.
Prosper had been on a bloodthirsty mission to commit the ‘biggest massacre in the 21st century’ and had a sordid dream of outdoing the death toll of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre in the US, in which 32 people were murdered.
The school dropout launched his rampage on September 13 last year, first blasting his mother, Juliana Falcon, 48, and siblings Kyle Prosper, 16, and Giselle Prosper, 13, in the head at their Luton home before setting off for the school intending to ‘kill all’.
After gunning down his family, Prosper, who was 18 at the time, set off towards his old primary school armed with a loaded shotgun, a kitchen knife and a bag of ammunition, to continue his killing spree.
The gunman, who was 18 at the time, fantasised about shooting a classroom of 30 children aged four and five and their teachers, by bursting into the assembly at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School at 9am.
But Prosper was stopped by police by chance as he was on his way to carry out the school massacre, his hands still covered in blood.
He was jailed for a minimum term of 49 years last month for the murders of his family.
Robert Child
Robert Child, 37, was jailed for life in 2020 after he struck his 64-year-old mother Janice with a hammer 31 times in a ‘merciless attack’ at her home in Liverpool.
He then left her body locked in her house and just minutes later, used her mobile phone to transfer £25,000 of her savings into his bank account.
The sports psychologist subsequently caught a bus where he was seen on CCTV ‘smiling and laughing’ with the driver, Liverpool Crown Court previously heard.
And when police arrived at his home in Thingwall on the Wirral the following morning to inform him of her death, he was out buying a Jaguar car.
Child, described by the sentencing judge as a ‘selfish narcissist’, feigned shock and surprise to detectives and lied about his whereabouts.
He also made calls to and from his mother’s phone to keep up the pretence he was unaware of her death.
The court previously heard how Child had looked at buying the £14,000 car in February but was unable to provide the deposit.
Child later admitted to murdering his mother, who was found in a bloodstained utility room under the stairs of her home.
The court heard he had credit card and loan defaults amounting to £30,000, as well as county court judgments totalling £16,000 against him, but was living ‘far far beyond his means’.
Daniel Bartlam
Daniel Bartlam was just 14 when he hit mother Jacqueline Bartlam, 47, seven times with a claw hammer at their detached cul-de-sac home.
The former public schoolboy then padded her body with paper, doused it in petrol and set fire to it in a bid to destroy evidence and commit the ‘perfect murder’.
Bartlam was inspired to carry out the killing by a plot in Coronation Street, where one of the characters – John Stape – murders a woman with a hammer.
He had also been fascinated by violent video games rated 18 and DVDs, including Nightmare on Elm Street and the Evil Dead series, since the age of eight.
Bartlam was jailed for 16 years in April 2012 after a jury unanimously found him guilty of murder.
Sentencing Bartlam, the judge said the murder involved a high degree of planning, and Bartlam remained ‘extremely dangerous’.
During his trial, the jury were told he was a ‘young man who immersed himself in a fantasy world; fantasy words he wrote, television drama, films he accessed by the internet and other internet sites’.
Prosecutor Sean Smith added: ‘The boundaries between real life and fiction became very, very tragically blurred.’
Jeremy Bamber
Jeremy Bamber was convicted of shooting dead his adoptive parents Nevill and June, both 61, in August 1985.
He also murdered his adoptive sister Sheila Caffell, 28, and her twins Daniel and Nicholas, six, on the family farm near Maldon in Essex.
Bamber – whose case was featured in the 2020 ITV crime drama ‘White House Farm’ – is serving a whole-life tariff for killings.
He has, however, always maintained that he is innocent and that Sheila, a paranoid schizophrenic, carried out the murders before shooting herself at the family’s farm.
Bamber is the only whole-life prisoner in the British prison system to maintain his innocence.
Last week his bid to clear his name received a significant boost after bombshell claims by a police whistleblower that officers tampered with the crime scene to place Bamber in the frame for the killings.
The retired Essex Police CID officer has broken ranks after reading Bamber’s submissions to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which is deciding whether to refer the case to the Court of Appeal.
He also received a boost last year after an article in the New Yorker magazine highlighted more than a dozen apparent discrepancies in the prosecution’s case.
The submissions, which are under review by the CCRC, include evidence from one of the world’s leading ballistics experts who says the jury may have been misled because Essex Police ‘changed the evidence’ by moving Nevill Bamber’s body before the crime scene photos were taken.