Right up until the moment he shot dead his mother and two siblings last September, Nicholas Prosper was seen as a loner – a socially awkward computer geek who kept himself to himself.
Neighbours living in the same block of council flats in Luton, Bedfordshire, barely recall the quiet teenager who hid himself away in his bedroom, using his computer to delve secretly into the darkest corners of the internet.
If he was regarded as odd, then none of them could have foreseen the carnage he was plotting – not just the cold-blooded murder of three members of his family but also the planned massacre of children at the Catholic primary school he once attended.
Mercifully, he was arrested before he carried out the second part of his wicked plot.
But could 48-year-old Juliana, Kyle, 16, and Giselle, 13, also have been saved? For, a week after 19-year-old Prosper pleaded guilty to the murders, the Mail has been told that concerns were raised about the teenager’s deteriorating mental health in the years and months leading up to the tragedy.
A neighbour has told this newspaper that his Argentinian-born mother Juliana, a customer services assistant at a local Sainsbury’s, had asked for help with her ‘difficult and troubled boy’.
‘She tried to get help, seeking assistance from his school and the local authority,’ said the neighbour, who asked not to be named. ‘She wanted a referral to a specialist for his behavioural problems.’
Nicholas, she said, was a ‘very weird and warped teen’, ‘a loner with a grudge against the world’ and often locked himself in his bedroom, refusing to engage with his mother and two younger siblings.
‘He was extremely difficult and troubled,’ said the neighbour, who added that, after the breakdown of Juliana’s marriage to Nicholas’s father, the newly single mother ‘couldn’t cope’.
‘Nicholas argued with his mum and blamed her for his dad leaving,’ she added. ‘There was trouble at home and I heard from other neighbours that the police were called out. It was nothing too serious, just domestic rows and shouting. She asked for help but I don’t know if she got it.’
Could this explain 47-year-old Ray Prosper’s public outburst during one of his son’s earlier court appearances when he called out: ‘I still love you, son. I know it’s not your fault, OK?’
This week, Bedfordshire Police did not respond to questions about whether their officers had previously attended the council tower block in Luton where the Prosper family had lived for years.
East London NHS Foundation Trust, which is responsible for mental health services in the Luton area, said Prosper was not under their care and they ‘won’t be commenting any further’.
And a spokesman for Luton Borough Council said that ‘at present we aren’t commenting further on this case’.
Prosper’s former Catholic secondary school, Cardinal Newman, also declined to comment.
But anyone who had the misfortune of encountering him, either on the internet or in real life, can have had little doubt that he was highly disturbed.
Even those who, like him, visited a gore website, featuring videos of people dying, complained about his online behaviour.
He was banned from one site – described as ‘a community intended to observe and contemplate the very real reality of death’ – because of his sickening views on child abuse, paedophilia and even necrophilia.
The dead, he tried to argue in the most depraved manner imaginable, couldn’t consent to be cremated, so why should there be any concern about them consenting to sex?
He also frequently claimed to be sexually aroused by the graphic videos he watched of car crashes, suicides, terror attacks and violent executions.
Prosper enjoyed spouting provocative and deeply disturbing views and arguing with those who dared to disagree with him, labelling them ‘retards’ and telling them, pompously, that they ‘don’t follow epistemic rationality’.
He used pseudo-academic and legal language in a bid to give himself an air of authority and cited controversial documents to lend weight to his arguments.
In one ten-page essay, he ranted about ‘institutionalised pseudo-justice’. One of his most frequent and wicked claims was that children were capable of consenting to sex with adults. He also made references to American school massacres, including those which took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012 and at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Florida in 2018.
He even followed several of the survivors of those terrible shootings on social media pages, including Instagram.
Born in Luton in December 2005, Prosper was Juliana Falcon’s second child. His surviving eldest brother is a university student. The two younger siblings he killed, say friends, were nothing like their troubled brother.
Outgoing Kyle was passionate about sports, including football and boxing. ‘Kyle was really nice, confident, welcoming,’ said a teenage girl who used to go to the same childminder when they were younger. ‘I liked him. I had no idea he had a brother – he never spoke about him.’
Giselle is said to have been a happy, fun-loving teenager with a passion for dancing.
Juliana was born in the Argentinian coastal city of Mar del Plata in June 1976 and studied at art college before coming to the UK when she was 20. She remained in close contact with family members who still live there. They, too, declined to speak about the case this week.
Last July, just weeks before her son turned on her and his siblings with a shotgun, Juliana posted an old family photograph of herself with all four of her children on Brighton Pier on a summer’s day. While it is not clear when it was taken, the children appear several years younger. Prosper is smiling happily, his arm placed lovingly around his mother’s shoulder.
He was just 14 when Britain went into lockdown in 2020 as the Covid pandemic struck.
Neighbours say he became reclusive. He was so rarely seen that some, this week, said they weren’t even aware he lived in Leabank Court, the council block where his family had a flat.
‘I’ve lived here in Leabank for 15 years and I never saw him once,’ said another of the family’s neighbours who spoke to the Mail.
‘Juliana and the other kids I saw, usually by the lifts. She would often say hello and chat. She was so nice. I saw all the other siblings but never Nicholas – ever.’
Prosper’s love of computer games grew into an obsession with one in particular. Set amid a zombie apocalypse in the US state of Georgia, The Walking Dead allows players to make decisions and influence the story’s direction as it moves through multiple episodes and seasons. The award-winning game sees players interact with the main character Lee Everett, a convicted criminal who becomes the guardian of a young girl named Clementine.
Prosper became infatuated with Clementine, imagining he was in a relationship with the cartoon child and using her image as his profile photo on social media. He was obsessed about protecting the fictional child and raged online at those who made choices which, he believed, might negatively impact her, such as killing in front of her.
As time went on, he began to confuse the online world he inhabited with the real one.
The life and death decisions he made while playing the video game began to spill over into the choices he would make in the real world. In a horrifying video he made just hours before the killings last year, Prosper described how he had introduced his sister Giselle to his beloved game several months earlier.
Speaking in a flat, monosyllabic voice, he appears to be reading from the screen in front of him when he declares without any emotion: ‘On June 30 my sister decided to make the incorrect choices on episode one of season one of The Walking Dead games and for that her face will be mutilated further than is necessary.’
He went on to describe himself as ‘the chosen one, chosen by Clementine’, adding: ‘I am guided as Christians are guided by Jesus Christ.’ After uploading the video, he added several photos of Clementine to a folder he’d made on the picture sharing site Pinterest.
At around 5.30am on the morning of Friday, September 13, neighbours were woken by the sound of gunshots and called the police. Officers arrived to find a scene of carnage. Juliana, Kyle and Giselle all died from gunshot wounds to the head. Having flooded the area with armed response officers, Prosper was found shortly afterwards in nearby Bramingham Road, where he had hidden a loaded shotgun in bushes along with a bag containing more than 30 cartridges.
After his arrest, an investigation launched by Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit soon uncovered his plot to carry out a massacre at St Joseph’s Primary School.
The foiled attack brings back distressing memories of the 1996 Dunblane massacre, the worst school shooting ever perpetrated in Britain, which saw disgraced former Scout master Thomas Hamilton kill 16 small children and a teacher before turning his gun on himself.
Once Prosper is sentenced later this month, police will have to explain to the public how this deranged killer managed to get his hands on a 12-bore Japanese Nikko shotgun without a licence. Questions must now be asked about whether the UK’s gun laws are fit for purpose given that weapons can be bought and sold online.
This haunting case comes amid growing concern about violent online content and how it might be influencing those who view it.
Southport killer Axel Rudakubana watched graphic and extremist videos before murdering three girls and seriously injuring eight other children and two adults at a dance class last July.
In 2021, Jake Davison killed five people in Plymouth, including his mother and a girl of three, after becoming fascinated by mass shootings and serial killers, and making disturbing online posts.
Ofcom says the number of people viewing content online which depicts or incites violence or injury is increasing year on year. According to its latest figures,
11 per cent of users aged 18 or older have seen such material, up from nine per cent a year earlier.
The communications regulator says that such online content is ‘unavoidable’ for UK children with many exposed to it for the first time while at primary school. This week, friends of Prosper’s tragic mother took part in a 13-mile charity run in Luton to raise money for a local branch of the mental health charity Mind, in the ‘hopes we can help them avoid another awful tragedy’.
According to a statement by the organisers: ‘We must keep her legacy alive and continue in her steps helping people however we can through charity work and just in our day to day lives as she always did. Our aim is to make sure that no one has to face a mental health problem alone.’
The run took place a year to the day that Juliana ran the same half-marathon route between each of Luton’s three Sainsbury’s stores – to raise money for the cancer charity Macmillan in support of a colleague who was battling the disease. The neighbour who spoke to the Mail said Juliana had a ‘heart of gold’ and would ‘do anything for anybody’.
‘When friends and neighbours were ill she would cook meals and hand-deliver them. She was very loving and caring, and always wanted to help,’ she said.
Whether or not, in her own hour of need, she received help in dealing with her son is another matter. Prosper pleaded guilty to the murders last week just as his trial was about to begin at Luton Crown Court. His sentencing has been delayed to the end of this month while psychiatric reports are compiled.
But with key questions remaining about the state of his mental health and how such a deeply damaged individual was able to get his hands on a gun, there is still a long way to go before a line can be drawn under this unimaginable tragedy.