THE man convicted of killing his wife and their two children in Salcombe has died.
John Allen was found guilty in 2002 of murdering his wife Patricia, 39, son Jonathan, seven, and daughter Victoria, five, 27 years after they went missing – despite their bodies never being found.
The judge, sentencing Allen at Exeter Crown Court, said: ‘Your success in disposing of the bodies very nearly thwarted the long arm of the law.
‘You kept your terrible secret, but the wild improbability of the accounts you have given and your characteristic dishonesty have rightly convinced the jury that there is no possible explanation for their disappearance other than you murdered them.’
Patricia, Jonathan and Victoria were last seen alive at the end of May 1975.
Womaniser Allen, who was having an affair with the recently widowed Eunice Yabsley, owner of the Galley restaurant in Salcombe Fore Street, had told her Patricia had left him.
Two days later, he claimed his mother had collected the children and taken them to stay with an aunt.
The smooth-talking conman, who had previously faked his own suicide, married bigamously and had served a jail term, then lost his job at the Marine Hotel, now the Salcombe Harbour Hotel, and the maisonette that went with it, at Powderham Villa, Devon Road.
He moved in with Mrs Yabsley and her three children, Catherine, Stephen and Lorna. Having sold the family home at Hangar Mill, near North Sands, to clear debts after the death of her husband, Charlie, they were living in a flat above the Galley.
Rumours were rife in the town and, after a cousin of Mrs Allen visited months later and could find no trace of her, police began an investigation.
Allen and Mrs Yabsley were both interviewed but were released after police could find no evidence of a crime – Allen’s wife and their two children were listed a ‘missing’.
Mrs Yabsley sold the Galley in 1982 and the couple moved to London. By 1987, their 12-year affair was over.
Allen served more time in prison, this time for fraud linked to an estate agency business he set up. In May 1990, he was sentenced to three years in jail for cheating house buyers out of £165,000.
The renewed police interest in the whereabouts of Mrs Allen, Jonathan and Victoria was sparked by Mrs Yabsley, who after their break-up wrote about the affair in a book called Presumed Dead, published in 1992.
The book contained, for the first time, a reference to the scratch marks on Allen’s arms, although it would take police eight years before they reinvestigated the case in 2000.
In her book, published in her maiden name Eunice Chapman, Mrs Yabsley recalled the morning of May 27, 1975, when Allen called at the Galley and had scratches on his arms.
She told the jury at Allen’s trial that he turned up at The Galley with his children and said his wife had left him. ‘He was shaken and upset ... He said he and Patricia had quarrelled and she had gone,’ she said.
Allen’s shirt cuff fell back and she noticed ‘parallel, deep scratches running from wrist to his elbow’, she said.
She agreed with the prosecution that she made no mention of the scratches in her police interview in October 1975.
‘By the time I came to make the statement I had been living with him for some time. I loved him very much.
‘I could not believe he had harmed anyone. To tell police he had scratches on his arm would blacken his name,’ she said.
Supt Paul Davies, the officer who led the second police investiation, said after the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict: ‘To have murdered his wife that fateful May Bank Holiday in 1975... was a despicable enough act.
‘No words can describe the sheer evil of a man who can then, two nights later, by his own hand in cold blood, murder his own two young children simply because they stood in the way of his desire to be with his lover and his wish for a new life.
‘John Allen has shown what a callous and cold individual he is. He has not shown one shred of remorse since his wife and two children vanished, setting about instead to tell a catalogue of lies which finally caught up with him.’
Mrs Yabsley told the BBC after Allen’s conviction: ‘I think he is a psychopath. He is incapable of understanding how another person feels.
‘Not that I thought then he was a psychopath, I did not. It takes a really long time to get to know someone.’
She added: ‘To begin with, I was convinced he could not have done it, because you have to realise the enormity of the thing I was being asked to believe.
‘But over the years and towards the end of our relationship, I gradually came to see it in a different light.’
One of Allen’s later girlfriends, Amanda Lewis who had a three-year affair with him in the 1990s, said after his conviction: ‘John Allen was a sexual predator. He would target women who he thought would be useful to him. He was ruthless, but had the charm of the devil.’
In 2005, when setting the minumum term Allen, should serve in prison, the Hon Mr Justice David Steel said: ‘The only mitigating factor is the defendant’s age but for which my view on the appropriate tariff would have been materially longer.
‘Indeed the difficulty of the case, and the enormous period that has elapsed since the matters in question, is simply attributable to the defendant’s success in disposing of the bodies.
‘The motive for the killing of his wife appears to have been simply the desire to move on to a new life with a woman running a promising business. (He had disposed of his previous family in the opposite manner – by faking his own suicide.)
‘The (subsequent) killing of his two young children may have been promoted by the same callous motive: it is also possible that they presented a threat to him having seen or heard matters relating to the death and disposal of his wife.
‘The defendant is now 72 and in poor health. Nonetheless the only factor that might have resulted in a reduction of the tariff would have been disclosure of the whereabouts of the bodies. In my judgment, the appropriate tariff period is 18 years (less the time spent in custody on remand of 10 months nine days).’
Allen fell ill at Guys Marsh Prison in Shaftesbury and was transferred to Yeovil Hospital where he died of natural causes.
An inquest in the death of the 81-year-old has been opened and adjourned in Bournemouth.
Hopes that the bodies of his wife and their children might be found have probably died with him. Theories include that they were dumped in Salcombe estuary or at sea; or that they were buried in the foundations of the Great Gates luxury apartments complex, off Cliff Road, which was being built at the time they disappeared; or that they were dumped in a council tip at Molescombe, near Frogmore.
Eunice Yabsley, who moved back to Salcombe and has since remarried, said this week that she had nothing to say about Allen’s death.
She added she hadn’t spoken to him for almost 30 years. ‘It’s a long time ago,’ she said.
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JEWELLER Mike Yeoman met John Allen in late 1974.
Allen had just taken up the post of restaurant manager at the Marine Hotel and was introduced in the bar.
With Mr Yeoman on that evening were his wife Jenny; Pip and Mary Cozens, who ran the bakery next to The Galley; and Terry Andrews, the hotel’s manager and director.
Mr Yeoman said: ‘Terry formally introduced John Allen and Pip offered to buy him a “welcome to Salcombe drink”.
He said Allen asked for a double brandy which Pip paid for but then Allen winked at the barman and didn’t have the drink.
Mr Yeoman, who believed Allen was planning to pocket the money instead of having the drink, said: ‘I thought “you snidey little b*****d”. He had all the charm but he was insincere.’
Over the next few months, Mr Yeoman, who lived and had a shop opposite the Galley saw Allen pop into the restaurant many times, including on at least one occasion with his wife, Patricia.
Then Patricia suddenly disappeared, he said.
He added: ‘I couldn’t understand why Eunice Yabsley had fallen in love with this conman. He had a slimy attitude and was a bighead.’
Mr Yeoman said he also remembered that in the summer of 1975 a fellow jeweller, Percy Diamond, from Taunton, told him he had bought a few items from Allen during a regular visit to Salcombe – a fact mentioned in Mrs Yabsley’s book, Presumed Dead.
Mr Yeoman said he would see Allen around the town from time to time until Mrs Yabsley sold the Galley and she and her lover moved to London in 1982.
Then, in the late 1980s, Mr Yeoman bumped into Allen in Marbella, Spain.
He said: ‘I was about to ask him how Eunice and the kids [Catherine, Stephen and Lorna] were.
‘I went “how’s...” and he interrupted with “Let me introduce you to...” And he introduced me to his new woman.
‘I learned then that Allen and Eunice were no longer together.’
Asked what he thought of Allen’s murder conviction, Mr Yeoman who now has a jewellery shop in Island Street, Salcombe, said: ‘I definitely think he did it – I always thought it.’