A mother killed her husband and their four-year-old daughter fearing they would become vampires. Shelley Christopher, 36, stabbed 42-year-old Richard Brown 29 times and daughter Sophia six times.
The police were first alerted by social services after Christopher attended St Mary's hospital with another child she had stabbed and throttled. Officers went to Christopher's apartment in Notting Hill in London discovered Mr Brown's body in a bath filled with bloodied water and Sophia's body in bed with a bloodstained towel over her face. Christopher had inserted a broken pencil into Sophia's chest and a broken child's paint brush into Mr Brown's chest over a fear they may turn into vampires once they were dead.
After her arrest she said she had received an orange signal instructing her to kill.The signal had come from a lightbulb in the ceiling. She had done – or tried to do – what she was told. After she had attacked each of them with a knife, the lightbulb had told her to put something wooden into each of their chests in order to stop them from becoming vampires. to prevent the world being taken over by vampires. First, she attacked the surviving child, by strangling and then stabbing her with a plastic flower and a small knife. When Mr Brown arrived with Sophia and asked what was going on, Christopher said: "You're one of them. You're a vampire," and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest.
She later told a psychiatrist she believed Mr Brown's eyes had changed color and he was trying to bite her with his fangs. When Christopher asked if her daughter was "one of them," the little girl replied: "Yes, I am mummy," so she stabbed her too, according to her account.
Two days before the killings, Christopher, of Colville Square, went to a Mental Health Unit in north Kensington where she told staff someone was out to get her.