Killer in My Family: How Lee Ford became Britain's most evil step-dad

Holding a 2ft length of rope he'd found in the garage Lee Ford walked up behind his wife Lesley and strangled her to death. Over the course of the next 24 hours the jealous and controlling killer would go on to murder his four step-children in exactly the same gruesome manner.

He then wrapped their bodies in sheets, covered them in lime and buried them in the woodshed at the bottom of the garden. The murders, which are the subject of true crime documentary The Killer in My Family on Quest Red tonight (Saturday), lay undiscovered for a month as Ford, then 33, embarked on an elaborate cover-up.

Tragic Lesley and her children Sarah Jane, 17, Anne Marie, 16, Steven, 14, and Craig, 13, were last seen alive at the end of August 2000. Ford told friends and neighbours in the quiet Cornish hill village of Carnkie that Lesley, 36, had left him and taken the children with her.

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He cancelled a job interview, saying the family had gone down with food poisoning. He sent his two surviving children to stay with relatives and moved the youngest of his children to a new school, while continuing to live in his pebble-dashed bungalow.

He even attempted to cash in Sarah's last wage packet from McDonald's and made advances to a former girlfriend saying his wife had left him. And, days before the first body was found, Ford asked a neighbour if he could store some Christmas presents at his home so the children would not find them.

But when police visited Ford, after being contacted by Lesley's worried brother Peter Wyatt, the killer panicked and reburied the decaying bodies of Sarah and Anne Marie. He packed them in polythene and wore a face mask to shift them in his car