For more than 400 years Blundell’s School has offered a quintessentially English education.
Surrounded by rolling Devon countryside, its old boys include a roster of famous sportsmen, authors and politicians – and even an Archbishop of Canterbury.
‘Blundell’s is the archetypal all-rounder,’ reads a review by society-bible Tatler, which rated it as one of Britain’s best public schools. Of course, excellence costs and with boarding fees at £45,000 a year, it is increasingly looking to international students to fill its spaces. Indeed, one in eight pupils now hails from abroad.
And, like many of them, Thomas Wei Huang came from a privileged background. He was raised in Malaysia where his father Terence earned a fortune as one of the country’s top financial analysts.
And so it was he chose to pay for what he hoped would be the best education money could buy, enrolling his two sons at Blundell’s. But 17-year-old Huang, the youngest brother, would never finish that education. Instead, he is beginning a life sentence for attempting to murder two fellow pupils and his housemaster.
Huang’s identity could not be revealed until now because he is under 18. But judge Mrs Justice Cutts, who presided over his trial at Exeter Crown Court this summer, yesterday lifted that restriction.
The jury in the 11-week trial had heard how Huang set about his teenage victims with a hammer as they slept, before attacking Henry Roffe-Silvester after he came to investigate the disturbance.
That all three survived, all be it with varying degrees of injuries, was a miracle. One paramedic described the scene in the dormitory at the school in Tiverton, as worse than a war zone. ‘I have served in Iraq and had never seen such a scene of carnage, with blood over the desks, over the walls and the beds,’ he said.
Huang was arrested there and then. In the weeks that followed, evidence gathered by police built a compelling picture of a premeditated attack carried out by a young man in the grip of a ‘killing rage’. It can now be revealed that Huang used the password ‘Thomas the school murderer’ to log in to a gaming website.
Equally extraordinary was the explanation given by the teenager for what had happened. He claimed that throughout the incident he had been asleep – and committed the crimes while sleepwalking.
‘I just woke up and was in shock,’ he claimed, saying he had absolutely no recollection of the attack. ‘All I could see was blood.’
‘No one can be guilty of committing such an offence whilst asleep – you have to be fully conscious and in control of your actions to be criminally liable for them,’ Kerim Fuad KC, defending, had told the court.
But in June the jury at Exeter decided this young man knew exactly what he was doing – finding him guilty of three counts of attempted murder.
The teenager, who turns 18 in January, was sentenced two weeks ago when he was detained for life, with a minimum of 12 years to be served before he could be considered for parole.
At that hearing, Mrs Justice Cutts lifted reporting restriction preventing Huang being identified. But his lawyers indicated they might wish to make further legal applications regarding the matter and the judge ordered a stay on her ruling until yesterday.
Mr Fuad KC had argued Huang was entitled to lifelong anonymity because in the run up to the attack he had been the victim of a sex crime. His family had also said he should not be named, claiming it would affect his mental health and ‘would crush him’.
Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he was initially educated, Huang joined Blundell’s aged 13, two years after his brother, and appeared to settle in well. Staff described him as ‘quiet, polite, respectful and reserved’.
Giving evidence, Huang told the jury: ‘I wanted to come to England to study in a boarding school. I knew that I would have to live in school seven days a week. I was excited to be doing it.’
A bright child with autism, Huang spoke four languages – English, German, Mandarin and Malay and excelled at maths and biology.
The family owns a £1million-plus luxury flat in London’s Battersea Power Station redevelopment and holidays would be spent with his aunt, in the capital, or travelling in Europe, where the family would often go skiing.
The boy’s paternal great-grandfather is Huang Yao, a painter. His works, which are promoted by a family-run foundation, sell for tens of thousands of pounds.
Boarders at Blundell’s are cared for in single-sex houses, the cornerstone of a pastoral care system. ‘At Blundell’s we focus on teaching pupils how to have good relationships, both with each other and with the adults in their lives,’ the school’s head states on its website.
But what we now know is that after two years at the school, Huang’s relationships with fellow pupils were becoming strained as he exhibited increasingly unpleasant behaviour towards them.
One of them, a 15-year-old who cannot be named because of his age and who we shall call Boy A, would tell police that while he and the defendant had been friends in the previous year there had been a ‘complete change’ after the summer holidays in 2022.
The trigger was a trivial one – the defendant thought Boy A laughed at his suggestion that they could make a chess robot as part of a science project.
‘It was never the same after that,’ Boy A said, describing how he received messages from the older boy telling him he hated him. ‘F***ing die,’ another read.
Images sent included a picture of Leatherface, a character from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, attacking a victim with a hammer.
‘What did I do to deserve this?’ Boy A replied to the abuse. ‘If you carry on like this I will have to speak to the housemaster.’
In the room they shared at the school, Huang would smash up Boy A’s possessions with a hammer he kept in a locked ‘weapon drawer’. It contained three more hammers, screwdrivers, a staple gun and a piece of broken mirror.
In the spring of last year he researched how mass murderers got caught and looked up sentencing guidelines. In a WhatsApp group he set up a survey asking if homosexuals should be executed. Other searches included: ‘What would happen if I hit someone on the head with a hammer. Would he lose consciousness?’
Huang’s second victim – Boy B, who was 16 at the time of the attack – described an occasion where he saw the ‘annoyed’ defendant swinging a hammer towards two other students. He also saw the defendant threaten Boy A with a Swiss Army knife, making a stabbing or slashing motion with his arm.
The jury heard that on two occasions the boy’s hammer had been taken from him at school, once by a matron who handed it to the housemaster. The housemaster confirmed a ‘tools amnesty’ had been held after someone using a screwdriver had stolen components from equipment in the computer room.
But Huang claimed the hammer had been returned to him on the understanding he took it home. He did not – and then appears to have purchased three more. And nor had his bullying of Boy A gone unnoticed by Mr Roffe-Silvester, 39, who spoke to him about it and his use of ‘unkind language’ in March of last year.
While he was said to have appeared ‘suitably remorseful’, immediately after he messaged friends claiming he had been punished and it was Boy A’s fault.
Huang claimed he requested a move from the dormitory on four occasions. But this had not happened – another reason, the court heard, for the boy to hold a grudge against his housemaster.
What the final trigger for the attack was, is unclear. But, armed with three hammers, he set about the two boys in their cabin-style beds. James Dawes KC, prosecuting, told the court: ‘The boys are asleep, and they had both had their heads on pillows, and then he smashed a hammer or hammers into their heads as they slept, multiple times.
‘He also hit arms and backs. He didn’t just use the flat end of the hammer – he used the claw end as well to strike these boys. These blows smashed their skulls.’
Mr Roffe-Silvester, who was in his own quarters, was awoken and went to investigate. When he entered the bedroom where the attack had happened, he saw a silhouetted figure who turned towards him and struck him six times over the head with a hammer.
‘His eyes were focussed on me,’ the housemaster told police. ‘He was wide eyed. I don’t think he had an expression on his face, just fairly neutral. It felt like he was looking at me but it did not feel like he was. It’s hard to describe.’
The prosecution also pointed out that an examination of the defendant’s iPad revealed he had been listening to music on Spotify moments before the assaults.
After his arrest, Huang refused to comment during police interviews. The prosecution claimed this was to allow him time to come up with an explanation.
That defence, outlined in court, was that while he admitted the attacks he was asleep when he carried them out.
Kerim Fuad KC, defending, told the jury, that ahead of the incident the defendant had been ‘a sleep-deprived super-stressed wreck’. He said: ‘He had been glued to his phone and iPad systematically, continuously, almost religiously, in the early hours of just about every night for some time.’
As for the actual attacks, Huang told the jury he remembered nothing of them.
Asked if he had intended to kill his victims he added: ‘I feel terribly sorry for all three individuals for what I did to them. I have a good life here, why would I be interested in destroying my life?’
Following the conclusion of the trial, Bart Wielenga, Blundell’s head said he was ‘tremendously proud’ of the school community’s response to the incident.
He wrote: ‘I have stressed to pupils in numerous assemblies over the past year that this incident is not something we are ashamed of. It is part of our shared story. Difficult things happen in life, and we want to teach young people that we can talk openly about our fears and anxieties as they relate to difficult events in life.’
While his conviction for attempted murder means Huang will not be considered for parole for at least 12 years, the impact on his victims will never go away. Both survived only after emergency surgery.
Boy A suffered at least 15 wounds to the scalp and a fractured skull while Boy B sustained brain damage
with bone fragments forced into his brain.
As Mr Dawes told the court: ‘Sadly, neither of them will ever be the same again as they were prior to the attack.’