Dad who strangled wife and battered daughter to death with hammer while on cancer drugs jailed for life

Peter Redfern had taken a cocktail of powerful drugs to treat bone marrow cancer that could lead to 'adverse psychiatric events'

Guilty: Peter Redfern's lawyer said the killings would never have happened if he hadn't taken the drugs

A terminal cancer suffered who murdered his wife and daughter will die behind bars.
Peter Redfern, 70, had lived an “exemplary and quiet” family life with wife Jean, 67, and daughter Sarah, 33, who was more like her best friend.
He strangled his wife and battered Sarah to death with a hammer from behind.

After he was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer he took part in a chemotherapy trial with a combination of drugs which made his depression worse.
Jailing him for life with a minimum term of 17 years Mr Justice Stephen Males told Redfern: “The setting of a minimum term is in one sense academic because your age and the cancer from which you suffer make it as certain as anything can be that you will die in prison whatever minimum term I set.”
Redfern wept in the dock as he was sentenced.
The judge set before the tragedy they were a “loving, self-sufficient and contented family with no known problems or conflicts”.
But the drugs he took in his cancer treatment had created “unpleasant” side effects leading to a rare adverse psychiatric reaction.
“On the balance of probabilities you killed your wife on impulse when your mental functioning was abnormally affected in this way,” said the judge.
“Precisely how or why this happened may never be known.”
He then made a “deliberate and dreadful” decision to bludgeon his daughter with a hammer after laying in wait for her to return from her work as a shop assistant.

South Yorkshire Police

Redfern admitted the manslaughter of his wife on the grounds of diminished responsibility and the murder of his daughter at their bungalow home in Wath upon Dearne, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, on July 22 last year.
Graham Reeds QC, prosecuting, said Redfern had been diagnosed with incurable cancer and was using corticosteroids which in a small number of cases could lead to “drug-induced adverse psychiatric events”.
The pensioner rang 999 to say: ‘My name’s Peter Redfern. I have just killed my wife and daughter.”
Police officers found Jean dead in the bedroom and Sarah in the kitchen both with plastic bags over their heads secured with white electrical flex around their necks.
After the hearing Det Chief Insp Chris Singleton said: “Peter Redfern killed his wife and daughter in an attack that was shocking and impossible to understand. Only he knows why he committed such a violent act.”