The trial brought issues of rural crime and policing to the top of the political agenda. CHRIS BISHOP reports

October 30, 2001

Just hours before the shooting, a local politician warned people living around Emneth would start taking the law into their own hands unless something was done to stem a flood of petty theft and vandalism.

Tony Martin walked straight into a vacant soundbite when he picked up his gun and headed downstairs. While he was spirited away to a safe house to await trial, his supporters - most of whom he had never met before the shooting - continually pushed the Englishman defending his castle angle, rather than Martin’s mental health.

The pump action Winchester shotgun used by Tony Martin to kill Fred Barras.

Most of them probably didn’t even realise how ill he was. The debate was all about how far would you go in the same position, classic jaw fodder from the church fetes and coffee mornings of Middle England to the market squares and village pubs of Fenland.

If the true picture of Martin’s mental health had emerged at the trial things would have been very different. The defence would certainly have cast serious doubts over the degree of responsibility he was capable of at the time he pulled the trigger.

One question which needs to be asked is how someone can reach the age of 56 with a profound mental disorder which goes without detection until he shoots someone. Here was a man crying out for help, in his own bizarre way, but nobody heard him.

Another is why three burglars with more than 100 convictions between them were still roaming the countryside. They found a pink bail sheet in Fred Barras’s pocket when they came across his broken body lying in the undergrowth. He had been arrested on suspicion of stealing garden furniture a few days before his final thieving expedition.

Darren Bark had only been free for a few weeks before he drove Barras and Fearon from Newark to Norfolk. A four-year sentence for antique theft had just been commuted to two years on appeal.

In an interview published in the EDP two weeks ago, Brendan Fearon pledged he was going straight. Darren Bark had other ideas when he was released from prison, after serving part of a 42-month sentence for his part in the Bleak House break-in and an unconnected burglary.

On the day Martin stepped into the dock at the Appeal Court, Bark admitted burglary, making threats to kill and causing actual bodily harm in front of Judge Linda Sutcliffe at Sheffield Crown Court. He was remanded in custody and sentence was adjourned until November 12.

One thief lies in his grave, one says he’s learned from the experience and the other hasn’t on the face of it. So where does all this leave the man who pulled the trigger?

I bet Martin wishes that when he found the gun which shot Fred Barras - which was allegedly left at his farm with a note signed by a well-wisher - he’d slung it in the nearest ditch.

Farmer's fight for freedom
Refuge at Bleak House
Key Events
The Tony Martin File