Tony Martin, farmer whose shooting of a teenage burglar sparked national soul-searching

Tony Martin, who has died aged 80, was sentenced to life in prison in 2000 for the murder of a teenage criminal he caught burgling his house; the case became a cause célèbre, touching a raw nerve among Britain’s homeowners and revealing a huge gulf between public opinion and the priorities of Britain’s criminal justice system.

An eccentric loner, Martin was obsessed with security at his dilapidated Norfolk farmhouse, known as Bleak House. At issue was the question of whether, in trying to defend his property and perhaps his own life, Martin had used reasonable force against the intruders.

On the night of Friday August 20 1999, Martin was awoken by the sounds of what he suspected was a burglary downstairs. Having been burgled or robbed 10 times in as many years, Martin had despaired of the police and had armed himself with a well-oiled 12-bore Winchester pump action shotgun, for which he held no licence.

In what he described as a state of terror, Martin descended the stairs and fired into the darkness at least three times, wounding one burglar in the leg and killing the other, a 16 year old gypsy named Fred Barras, whom he had shot in the back. Both Barras and his wounded accomplice, Brendan Fearon, were habitual thieves; with their getaway driver, who remained outside, between them they boasted 114 criminal convictions.

Martin originally claimed that he was in his bedroom when he was woken by the sound of the raiders breaking in. He said he fired from the rickety stairs into his breakfast room in panic after a torch was shone into his eyes.

Forensic evidence, however, tended to support the prosecution case that he had been waiting for the burglars in the dark on the ground floor of his home and had effectively “executed” Barras. Tests showed that at least two of the shots must have been fired by Martin while he was downstairs, and the defence accepted that Martin had, in fact, been downstairs. The jury decided his actions went beyond appropriate self-defence and found him guilty of murder.

But in the fevered atmosphere that surrounded the case, the facts tended to be forgotten. Some sections of the media hailed Martin as a folk hero – depicting him as an ordinary man who, plagued by burglars and let down by the police, had struck back in desperation. In one television poll soon after the verdict, 85 per cent of those who voted said they believed the jury had got it wrong.

Much was made of the contrast between the decent, ruddy-faced son of the soil, and Brendan Fearon, the burglar who survived, a pony-tailed, weasel-faced, recidivist career criminal. Fearon seemed to exemplify the modern breed of travelling criminal – the “bail bandit” who seemed to be able to offend and reoffend with no risk of incurring any higher penalty, metaphorically speaking, than a slapped wrist.

The affair so troubled the prime minister, Tony Blair, that he wondered in a memo, which was duly leaked, whether Labour was losing touch with public opinion. But little changed. Police chiefs promised to give higher priority to rural crime; demands that the government should reform the law on self-defence were rejected.

Even when Martin’s sentence was reduced to manslaughter, the controversy raged on, compounded by the revelation that Fearon had been granted legal aid to sue Martin for “loss of earnings”, and later by Fearon’s early release after serving five months of an 18-month sentence for dealing heroin. “Mr Fearon was freed because he expressed remorse for his crime,” reported the Daily Mirror. “Mr Martin has served two-thirds of his five-year sentence because he refused to express regret.”

During Martin’s trial, there had been two crucial issues at stake: where Martin was standing when he opened fire on the burglars, and his mental state at the time. The prosecution in the case drew attention to Martin’s bizarre bachelor lifestyle to undermine his credibility during the trial but, under instructions from their client, Martin’s defence team were prevented from pursuing an argument for diminished responsibility. Yet it was evidence about his mental health problems that led, 18 months later, to his conviction being reduced to manslaughter and his sentence cut to five years.

For behind the impassioned public debate about law and order lay much deeper questions about the way in which society deals with the mentally ill. The reality was that Martin’s story was not that of a folk hero, but of a deluded, unstable and lonely man whose problems were never recognised and who never got the help he needed.

Tony Martin was born on December 16 1944 in the Cambridgeshire fenland village of Wisbech, just a few miles from Bleak House, the farmhouse where Fred Barras would meet his end. His father was a wealthy fruit farmer and both parents came from local farming families.

Though not bright academically, Martin was educated privately, first at Glebe House, a prep school in Hunstanton, where he won a prize for sports, then at Cokethorpe Park School, Oxfordshire, where he was his year’s outstanding all-round sportsman. Even then he was something of a loner, though there was little sign of the mental instability that would plague him in later life.

After leaving school aged 17, Martin began to travel, working on farms in Australia, serving as a steward on cruise liners in the Indo-Pacific, jumping ship in New Zealand and getting his first taste of prison as an illegal alien. He was away for several years and, even when he returned, he avoided the family farming business and went instead to labour on North Sea oil rigs.

Still a handsome, dashing young man who drove a Lotus Elan, he finally came back to Norfolk in the mid 1970s after the death of his grandfather, and took over the running of a pig farm on his parents’ property. In 1979, he inherited, from an aunt and uncle, Bleak House, a red-brick Victorian property outside the village of Emneth Hungate.

At first he talked of renovating the house, but the will failed him and he allowed the house and the surrounding garden to go to rack and ruin. He did, however, buy land, eventually building his holding to a property of 350 acres with an orchard of trees growing apples, pears and plums, and pursuing his hobbies of model-making and collecting antiques, including silver, furniture and objets d’art.

It is not clear exactly when or why Martin began to go off the rails – there was talk of unrequited love and claims that he had been abused as a child by a distant relative. At his appeal, a consultant psychiatrist concluded that he had been suffering from a “paranoid personality disorder” for many years, and that he had suffered bouts of depression throughout his adult life.

Local thieves believed that Martin’s collection was worth in the order of £100,000, and during the 1990s he suffered – or so he claimed – a series of burglaries, but the police did nothing. Though he certainly had been a victim, police sources cast doubt on whether many of the incidents cited had in fact occurred.

Be that as it may, the obsession came to dominate Martin’s life. After one such break-in, Martin had been heard to remark that “if I caught the bastards, I would shoot them”. Although many fellow Fenlanders felt the same way, few dared speak out, and the Bleak House recluse earned the nickname Madman Martin for breaking ranks.

With his three rottweilers beside him, he slept in his work clothes and boots on top of his bed rather than in it, boarded up all his windows and let the ivy and giant hogweed run riot so that his house could barely be seen. When the jury paid a visit, police were forced to clear sackloads of rubble from the floors and point out booby traps on the landing.

He also began to get a reputation for being somewhat cavalier in the use of firearms. In 1976, he was alleged to have gone to a friend’s house brandishing a First World War revolver: a shot was fired and a pigeon killed; in 1987, he became involved in a violent argument with his older brother and used a shotgun to smash windows in his brother’s home; in 1994 he had his shotgun certificate revoked after he found a man scrumping apples in his orchard and shot a hole in the back of his van. The pump-action Winchester which he used to kill Fred Barras was one of two guns he held illegally.

Apart from thieves, Martin’s pet hate was Gypsies, whom he called “diddies” or “pykies”. The trial heard that he believed Hitler “had the right idea”, and had talked of putting Gypsies in the middle of a field, surrounding it with barbed wire and machine-gunning the lot. Fred Barras was both a Gypsy and a thief.

In the years leading up to his killing, Martin had become increasingly isolated and depressed. In 1997, he suffered a thrombosis in his leg and his health and general fitness subsequently deteriorated, exacerbating his feelings of vulnerability and paranoia.

Yet no one was alerted to do anything to help – not that Martin gave them any encouragement. He had few friends. Some locals regarded him as eccentric but essentially harmless; others felt he was unbalanced and potentially dangerous. Both factions gave him a wide berth. The few who tolerated his company did so out of compassion. In general, he preferred the company of his dogs and his collection of teddy bears whom he thought of as “very nice people”.

Martin did not mix much with the other inmates in prison and continued to sleep fully dressed and on top of his bed. He was released from custody on July 28 2003 after serving two-thirds of a five-year jail term. On his release, he said he wanted to return to Bleak House, “depending on the season” and “when the mood is right”, though towards the end of the year he was said to be camping out in a car.

In a deal brokered by the publicist Max Clifford, Martin sold his story to the Daily Mirror for a reported £125,000. Meanwhile Fearon’s supporters were said to have put a bounty on Martin’s head of several tens of thousands of pounds.

Martin subsequently dabbled in Right-wing politics, appearing on a Ukip platform and also endorsing the BNP. He was ineligible to stand for Parliament, however, because of his manslaughter conviction.

The public anger over his conviction continued to boil and still had the capacity to take unwary politicians by surprise. In December 2003, a proposal to allow homeowners to use “any means” to defend their homes (dubbed the Tony Martin Law) topped a BBC poll on the measure people would most like to see become law — to the embarrassment of Stephen Pound, the Labour MP who had offered his services in taking the chosen bill through the House of Commons. He promised, reluctantly, to see if he could find a colleague willing to take it on, but commented, only half-jokingly: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”

Tony Martin, born December 1944, death reported February 2 2025

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