Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “They seemed dazed,” she says, “out of their depth. And drunk. They must have known on some level that this wasn’t right, but instead of admitting it, there was a restrained crossness about them. Robert kept saying, ‘You’re just not getting it. You’re not getting it. You don’t get it.’”

  “‘Not getting it’?” I ask.

  “He meant, ‘You’re not getting what this is about,’” she says. “‘You’re not getting how idyllic it is.’”

  The saddest thing, Laura says, was that the most clearheaded family member was Christopher, the teenage son. He was the only one trying to make everything OK. Laura negotiated with him, and they agreed to stay a week and get a refund for the second. On day two they decided to try out the games room.

  “In the hall right outside it,” Laura says, “propped up against the wall, was a shotgun.”

  “Was it loaded?” I ask.

  “There was live ammunition on the shelf next to it,” she says.

  When they left, Laura let the tourist office in nearby Fougères know what a mess the place was. They told her they’d had countless similar reports and had been trying to shut down the place for years. It was widely known in the area, she says, that Château de Fretay was a disaster.

  From August 2006 onwards, anybody Googling the château would have straightaway come across Laura’s startling reviews on TripAdvisor and Mumsnet: “BEWARE: CHTEAU DE FRETAY!!”

  The Halls’ neighbors—farmers who didn’t want to be named—tell me that very few tourists, if any, came to stay at the château these past few years. The Halls’ income seemed to dry up.

  • • •

  THE HALLS HAD BEEN in France for only a year when, in 2000, Robert Hall called on Yves Bourel, a local journalist. Yves knew him by reputation, he says, as there had been some excitement locally about the family’s arrival. “English people with money usually go to the south of France,” he tells me. “We tend to get the poor English people here, because living here is cheap.”

  Yves and I are having breakfast at my hotel in Fougères.

  “Why did he come to see you?” I ask.

  “He had a business proposal he wanted publicized,” he says. “He wanted to create a hot-air balloon port from the grounds of the château.”

  “Oh?” I say.

  “We have a lot of wind here,” he says. “The balloons would have lifted off and . . . whoosh!” He waves his arm to indicate a hot-air balloon flying uncontrollably away.

  We laugh. “Did anyone say anything to them about the wind?” I ask.

  “Oh no!” he replies. “We don’t see rich English people often. So we put the red carpet out for them!”

  Yves asks if I’ve heard the news: The prosecutor has decided to charge Robert Hall with aggravated murder.

  • • •

  THERE’S A BEAUTIFUL double-fronted Georgian mill owner’s house outside Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, with an oak-paneled dining room, low beams, marble fireplaces. The windows look out across the fields where they filmed Last of the Summer Wine.

  In front of the big AGA-type stove in the kitchen, the owner, Richard Skelton, tells me a story about what happened shortly after they bought the place from the bank, who had repossessed it from the previous owner, Robert Hall. Late one night—this was in 1999—there was a knock on the door. Richard’s wife, Loretta, answered. Two frightening-looking men were standing there.

  “Is Robert in?” they asked.

  “They didn’t look like normal bailiffs,” Richard says. “These were serious, hard men.”

  Loretta knew something like this might happen one day. They had heard stories from the neighbors. On one especially creepy occasion, the next-door neighbor had had a knock on the door in the middle of the night. The two men standing there wouldn’t believe him when he said he wasn’t Robert Hall. He had to get a utility bill to prove it.

  “There was a trail of irresponsible behavior all over town,” Richard says. “Not paying loans back . . . And you should have seen the state of this place when we moved in. The pattern over and over is that people would do work for him, he wouldn’t pay them, so they’d walk away, leaving everything all rough and unfinished. Wiring, joinery . . .”

  Loretta told the men at the door that Robert Hall didn’t live there anymore, that he’d moved to France. Luckily, they took her word for it. As they left, one of them turned to her and said, quite cheerfully, “Oh, if you ever want someone beaten up, it’s two hundred pounds.”

  Richard gives me a tour of the house. He shows me the en suite bathroom. “They had a corner bath in here,” he says, “which was an utter disaster. It was cracked, leaking. The chap who put in the new toilet says it’s amazing any waste got out of the old one.”

  He pauses. “Everyone says Robert was a very closed person,” Richard says. “He was very sociable and charming, but after a conversation with him, you’d walk away realizing you’d learned nothing.”

  “What was Joanne like?” I ask.

  “She was considered to be lovely and charming,” he says. “A neighbor said that regular as clockwork she’d go blasting past the houses in a battered Porsche, taking the kids to school at five past nine. Everything was always chaotic.”

  I stop off at the local ironmonger’s store, J W Kaye, to test Richard’s story about Robert Hall leaving debts all over town.

  “Yes, he owed me money,” says Dave Earnshaw, who runs the place. “But it wasn’t much, so I didn’t think it was worth pursuing. He owed a lot of other people a lot more money than he owed me when he disappeared out of sight.”

  “To France?” I say.

  Dave shrugs: “I suppose.”

  He reels off a list of failed Robert Hall businesses: a kitchen place in Dewsbury; a fitness center; an abandoned golf-resort project in Derbyshire; a company that imported cars from Europe and (illegally) adapted them from left-hand to right-hand drive; a disastrous Santa’s grotto in the farmers’ market in Hollowgate.

  “He told Kirklees Council he was going to make it Christmassy and lovely, like a fair,” Dave says, “but when it opened, it was just a stall selling cheap plastic crap.”

  When the council shut it down, Robert Hall smashed his way back in with a baseball bat.

  MAN SELLING FESTIVE GIFTS IS CLOSED DOWN

  . . . Security guards are patrolling the former Castle garage in Hollowgate and Robert Hall has been given until the end of the month to remove his property. Mr. Hall admitted he broke in and continued to trade for two days after the locks were changed by the council. Councilor George Speight, who chairs the council’s markets committee, said, “In our opinion this was a market and not a fair.”

  —Huddersfield Examiner, December 1993

  “He always had big plans that were always . . .” Dave pauses. “Crumbling.”

  • • •

  A FEW HUNDRED MILES south of the Château de Fretay, in the countryside near Cognac, Maria-Louise Sawyer runs a support group for British people who’ve moved to rural France to try to live the Year in Provence–type dream, only to find the whole thing spiraling out of control.

  “It’s the same story time and again,” she says. And then—with a quite chilling fluidity—she tells me the “story”:

  “The French like to live in little tiny modern bungalows. When they inherit these big old properties, they don’t want them. So they sell them cheap to the British. Back in Britain, the man was working, the lady was home. That was fine. They saw each other for only a couple of hours in the evening and at weekends. But then they move here. These are larger properties with grounds. So they’re isolated. They can’t speak the language. The man is possibly renovating an old property, but he doesn’t know how to do it. Everything is different. You go to a government office, you don’t speak French, you’re an outsider. So he gets more and more isolated and resentful. He and his wife are together all the time. And they realize they don’t like each other. They drive each other bonkers. They drink, because the drink over here is les
s expensive than water. And then . . . bang.”

  Maria-Louise pauses. “That’s what happened with my husband. He buggered off back to Britain after shredding all my clothes, daubing food over the walls, and leaving a note that said, ‘I’ve gone.’”

  • • •

  THE DAY JOANNE HALL DIED, some neighbors saw her in the garden. It was the last sighting of her. She was pruning the trees and gardening—starting to plant the hundreds of seedlings in the plastic cups on the table that are still there but all dead now. The neighbors say she looked up at them and, with a big smile, waved.

  “I’ve Thought About Doing Myself in Loads of Times . . .”

  Maesbrook, Shropshire, is a beautiful, well-to-do village on the Welsh border. The houses are vine-covered Georgian mansions. The cars parked in the driveways are Range Rovers and Porsches. The people of Maesbrook are, by and large, self-made millionaires from Birmingham and Wolverhampton, entrepreneurs who’ve made it big.

  “I’d love to live somewhere like this if I could afford it,” I think ruefully as I drive through the village, closely tailed by a police car. The police have been following me ever since they spotted me reading the condolence bouquets on the road outside the grand Osbaston House.

  On August 26, the mansion’s owner, Christopher Foster, returned from a neighbor’s barbecue and meticulously destroyed everything he owned. At some point he made the decision to include his family in that. He shot his wife, Jill, in the back of her head in their bedroom. He did the same to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Kirstie, in her bedroom, interrupting her as she chatted with friends on Bebo. He shot the horses and the dogs, and he jammed a horse trailer against the gate and shot out the tires, presumably to stop potential Good Samaritans from intervening. He flooded the mansion with oil, set everything on fire, and then shot himself. A few hours later, the bailiffs arrived, unaware that the possessions they were supposed to impound that day no longer existed.

  “From a neighbouring family—absolutely stunned,” read one bouquet. “You were all such a lovely family,” read another.

  According to his friends, Foster adored his family in a very ordinary way. He was apparently forever seen laughing and joking and cuddling them while watching TV and so on, right up until the night he murdered them.

  I read the condolence cards for a few minutes and then a policeman pulls up.

  “Can I help you?” he asks.

  I show him my press card.

  “You look too scruffy to be a journalist,” he says.

  We both laugh. Then I bid him farewell and drive away. Now the police are following me, past the gated mansion belonging to John Hughes, the millionaire luxury car dealer whose barbecue and clay-pigeon shoot the Fosters attended a few hours before the murders; past their local pub, the Black Horse Inn; and toward my meeting with Foster’s friend and blacksmith, Ian.

  Had this been a working-class double murder-suicide, I don’t think the police would have bothered following me all the way out of town, but Maesbrook is a rarefied, aspirational village, and they seem to want to make absolutely sure I’ve gone.

  Once I’m out of the village limits, the police car turns around and I make the final part of the journey alone. Ian lives in Meifod, Powys. He’s a friendly, welcoming, shaven-headed man with five horses and eleven acres. We sit in his kitchen. He makes me a cup of tea and says he keeps remembering a weird incident that occurred a month before the murders.

  “Before I explain what it was,” Ian says, “let me tell you something about Chris Foster. He was always busy, messing with the horse trailer, cleaning it, fixing this or that, taking out trees. He was always home. I did wonder why he wasn’t at work. I knew he was something to do with oil, and everyone called him ‘the Millionaire,’ but he was always home. He kept his barn spotless.”

  “That’s weird,” I say, in a dark chuckle, “to keep a barn spotless.”

  “I keep mine spotless too,” Ian says.

  “Oh, well, not weird . . .” I say.

  “Let me show you my barn,” Ian says. “And then I’ll tell you about the weird thing that happened a month before the fire.”

  On the way to the barn I tell him what I’ve learned about why Foster was always home. In 1997, he had a eureka moment. He invented, and patented, a new chemical formula.

  “It came to him in a flash,” said Terence Baines, who’d been his accountant back then. I had phoned Terence shortly before leaving for Shropshire. “Before then, he was just an ordinary bloke from Wolverhampton,” Terence said, “a salesman living in Telford, working for some company that went bust. But one day he suddenly thought, ‘Hang on. If I get a bit of this and a bit of that, a bit of special rubber and plastic, and put it all together, it’ll make a new type of oil-rig insulation.’”

  Foster called his invention Ulva Shield. It won an apparently fantastically rare A1 fire-test rating. Where other oil-rig insulations burst into flames, Ulva Shield just formed a safe, crisp shell. The big oil companies began placing orders.

  “The company went great guns,” Terence continued. “Chris started dressing very smartly. He wanted to present himself well. He liked good holidays, a decent car . . .”

  Actually, he bought a fleet of decent cars—two Porsches, an Aston Martin, a 4×4 for his wife (with the license plate JILL 40), and a tractor for the mansion, Osbaston House, that he’d bought in Maesbrook. He was doing an extreme version of what an awful lot of people were doing back then: living on credit, believing the boom would never bust. “He never planned on what things would be like when he was sixty-five or seventy,” Terence said. “It was always ‘What can I do now?’”

  Along with the mansion and the cars, there were the affairs. Foster had at least eight mistresses, according to Jill’s sister, Anne Giddings. “He had a big thing about blondes,” Giddings later told the Sunday People. “Jill knew all about his affairs. There were lots of women on the scene. But she played the dutiful wife and kept quiet. He wasn’t a good-looking guy, but money did the talking. He was always flashing the cash—it seemed to give him confidence.”

  But then it all went bust. In 2003 Foster contracted a supplier, DRC Distribution, to manufacture Ulva Shield exclusively. But by 2005 his liabilities were £2.8 million higher than his assets, presumably because he’d spent so much on mansions and Porsches and guns and membership to various fancy clay-pigeon-shooting clubs. In desperation, Foster sourced a California supplier who could manufacture Ulva Shield cheaper. DRC found itself lumbered with a warehouse full of Ulva Shield it couldn’t sell because it was patented to Foster. DRC sued and won.

  At the Royal Courts of Justice, on February 28, 2008, Lord Justice Rimer said Foster was “bereft of the basic instincts of commercial morality. He was not to be trusted.” And so it all came crashing down. DRC took control of the Ulva Shield patent. Foster may have been lacking in commercial morality, but he certainly knew how to invent a good new fireproof chemical formula. Under DRC’s less flashy stewardship, Ulva Shield has become a huge deal in the oil-rig world, supplying to Exxon, BP, Shell, and thirty-nine other giants. Foster, meanwhile, suddenly found he had nothing to do but stay home and look after the horses and the fifteen acres.

  We reach Ian’s barn. It really is spotless. The hay is as smooth as a freshly made bed at a posh hotel. “Our horses are our lives. They’re everything to me and the children. I’m going through a divorce at the moment—”

  “Anyway,” I interrupt, “something weird happened a month before the murders . . . ?”

  “Oh yes,” Ian says. “I was at Osbaston House when there was an almighty crash. A massive branch, as big as a tree, had come off a willow and crashed onto the path. Chris came running up. He said his tractor had been parked exactly where the branch had landed, but he’d decided for absolutely no reason to reverse it forty yards out of the way a few minutes earlier. It was a lucky escape.” Ian falls silent. Then he adds, “Although if it had hit him, it would have been a godsend for the other two.”


  “Is that the weird incident?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Ian says.

  “It doesn’t seem that weird,” I say.

  “Well, think about it,” Ian says.

  Ian says it didn’t strike him as weird, either, at first, “but after the murders I was just so gutted, I started obsessively watching the news. . . . There was something about going to that place that was so nice. It was the welcome you had, from both of them, but especially Jill. She was bubbly, always had that same smile, always turned out very well, but not flash, just very well-groomed. Kirstie was very quiet but polite. And Chris would always give you a big handshake.” Ian pauses. “So I was watching the news, and I saw those pictures of the burned-out tractor, and it hit me. Chris had had absolutely no reason whatsoever to move the tractor that day. He said it himself. He didn’t chalk it up to anything. He just moved it. This was a man who invented a product. You have to be pretty active in your brain to invent something. And now he had so little in his life that he needed to fill his days by just moving a tractor up and down a path for no reason.”

  We head inside. Ian makes me another cup of tea. We sit in silence. Then Ian says, “What Chris did has put thoughts in my own head, I must admit.”

  “Sorry?” I ask.

  “I empathize with Chris,” Ian says. “And I feel guilty for empathizing.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Ian says. “There’s no way I could harm my children. But I’m going through a divorce at the moment. It’s looming. I probably seem normal and relaxed to you, but inside I’m finding it very stressful. My chest is real tight. I get this pain down here.” Ian points to his left side.

  “What’s the point of keeping all that stress hidden away?” I ask.

  “We’re supposed to be manly,” Ian replies. “We’re not supposed to get upset. We’re supposed to be the breadwinners and the providers, especially in our children’s eyes. We’re supposed to do miracles.”