Grim Crime of Passion

REGULARS at an Angmering pub were shocked to learn that a former customer had brutally murdered a woman and her little girl before shooting himself.

Peter O'Hare, known around Angmering as Pete the Poacher, shot his former lover Kaeron Adkins and her six-year-old daughter Victoria, at Ilminster, Somerset, last week.

He then turned the rifle on himself.

O'Hare, in his late 50s, lived in a cottage at Roundstone Lane, Angmering, in the 1970s and 1980s, a short distance from the Spotted Cow pub.

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He visited Angmering earlier this summer, meeting up again with acquaintances at the pub, including Tony Booty, who organises the Spotted Cow's annual conker competition.

Said Mr Booty: "He came back in June, but was on his own. I think it was the first time in about 10 years.

"He was his same old cheerful self, telling jokes and stories. In a way, he was the life and soul of the place, and there would often be a crowd gathered round him.

"He didn't talk about his personal life at all, but he didn't seem to have a care in the world.

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"Someone rang me up at home after reading about the shootings in the paper. I can't believe it, it sounds incredible that he could murder two people, one of them a six-year-old child.

"How could somebody do that?"

Mr Booty, of The Square, Angmering, said that, in spite of O'Hare's outgoing character, he was a strange man with quite a reputation, who had had numerous run-ins with the old village bobby because of his poaching activities.

On one occasion, Mr Booty recalled, O'Hare had been caught red-handed with Christmas trees stolen from the Duke of Norfolk's estate after the police matched tree rings from the stumps left behind with the rings on the chopped-down conifers.

He had also been banned from the Spotted Cow for a time because of his behaviour.

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Leonard Ireland, head gamekeeper for the Angmering Park Estate, first met O'Hare about 21 years ago. "He said if I ever wanted any help, give him a shout, but I never bothered.

"I was told through the grapevine to keep an eye on him, but our paths never crossed again."

O'Hare is thought to have run pubs at Twineham, near Haywards Heath, and Newbury, Berkshire. He had been living in Corfe, Somerset, for some time and working as a gamekeeper on a shooting estate.

Malcolm Welch, a pub landlord in Corfe, recalled the first time O'Hare went in for a drink. "He looked every inch the country squire. He was wearing a shooting jacket, tweeds and a hat and looked very pleased with himself.

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"That's why we were a bit surprised when a bit later on he was offering to clean chimneys, or garden, or do a bit of painting and decorating for people."

A Corfe villager said O'Hare had been "visibly depressed" after his relationship with Kaeron Adkins broke up.

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