My mum Sharon had trusted someone from her close-knit community to help her. But there were deadly consequences. By Rhian Brown, 35
Hand in hand, my little boy and I ran down our road and around the corner, coming to a stop outside a front door.
‘Can I knock, please?’ Kevaughn said.
‘Go on then, love,’ I replied.
He tapped and the door opened and there stood my mum, Sharon, with her arms open wide.
Kevaughn, three, leapt into them and she spun him round, covering him in kisses.
I laughed and, not for the first time, thought: How
lucky am I?
Mum and Kevaughn absolutely adored each other.
‘Nanny gives the best hugs ever,’ he’d say.
She called him her ‘baby boy’ and her eyes shone with pride whenever she talked about him.
I never had to worry about arranging childcare because Mum was always there to support me — just as she’d done all my life.
My parents had split up when I was small. And although I was close to my dad Devon, Mum and I were inseparable, and she was my role model.
She was simply the most wonderful person I knew.
Mum was a Jehovah’s Witness and had a strong faith, values and principles, which she instilled in me.
Growing up, our congregation near our home in Dudley, West Midlands didn’t have many young people, so Mum took me all over the country so I could make friends, and put on parties so she could bring young people together.
Things changed, though, when I met my partner and got pregnant at 29.
Being unmarried and living together was against the rules of the religion. So
I stopped being a practising Jehovah’s Witness, and that changed the dynamic between me and Mum.
I noticed that she wouldn’t always confide in me so much, especially when it came to the religious community.
But when Kevaughn was born, we saw each other more often.
‘He’s brought light and sunshine into my life,’ Mum would tell me.
Sadly, when Kevaughn was eight months old, we lost my dad to Covid.
We were heartbroken and leant on each other to get through.
Dad had been
a builder and he’d always said he would help Mum add the extension to her house she’d wanted. But she’d never been able to afford it.
'He's brought life into my life'
A year after Dad died, though, Mum found someone to do the work for her on a single-storey extension to her kitchen, which would give her an extra bathroom.
‘It will only take six to eight weeks,’ she said.
She hired a man called Peter Norgrove, a fellow Witness, after a mutual friend at their congregation had introduced him.
When I popped round, I saw him working, but didn’t really pay much attention.
But when I kept seeing
him at Mum’s months later,
I felt concerned.
‘Why is he still here?’ I asked. ‘The work should be completed by now.’
But the extension was a long way from being finished, and when my partner visited, he saw the work was shoddy and that Peter had cut corners.
‘You’ve got to get rid of him, Mum,’ I said.
But she said the work had progressed too far for her to let him go. She didn’t say as much, but I felt she was also reluctant to fire him because he was part of the community.
A year passed and the work dragged on and on.
Then Mum was made redundant from her job of 20 years.
She got a new job, but
I felt worried about her.
She wasn’t herself and seemed tired.
We’d chosen a school nearby for Kevaughn and Mum had agreed to do pick-ups and drop-
offs, but I wondered if she could cope.
She did her best to reassure me.
‘Let me settle into the new job and we’ll take it from there,’ she said.
But five days later,
I was at home when Mum’s best friend called.
‘You need to get to your mum’s,’ she said.
I had a horrible feeling and then my cousin came round.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘but your mum’s dead.’
I stared at him, not taking
it in.
‘What do you mean she’s dead?’ I said.
We ran round to Mum’s and found an ambulance and police cars outside.
While a friend looked after Kevaughn, I found an officer.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Can I see Mum?’
But no one would give me an answer.
I thought there must have been some sort
of freak accident. But then another thought struck me.
Had something more sinister happened to Mum?
Two days later, my suspicions were confirmed when the police charged someone with Mum’s murder.
It was Peter Norgrove.
I was stunned. I had so many questions.
Why had he done it?
Why had he turned on my kind and caring mum when
she’d given him a job?
Meanwhile, we missed Mum desperately and Kevaughn kept saying: ‘Where is Nanny?’
Six months later, Peter Norgrove, 43, of Sedgley, West Midlands, appeared at Wolverhampton Crown Court and admitted murder.
The court was told Mum had paid him £27,000 for the extension but, 15 months on, it still wasn’t finished.
Anxious about his poor time-keeping, she’d installed a video doorbell to prove he’d been lying about times when he’d claimed to be working.
She’d also kept notebooks about his poor time-keeping, something I didn’t know about.
I could tell he’d driven her mad with stress and anxiety, but she’d kept it from me, knowing I was forthright and would have handled things differently.
Shockingly, I learnt Norgrove was newly qualified and this was his first job.
My kind mum had done him a favour, but he’d taken advantage in the most appalling way.
And after he’d heard her criticising him to her friends, he’d snapped, hitting her over the
head up to eight times with a hammer.
Mum’s screams were recorded on the doorbell camera.
Afterwards, Norgrove could be seen on the camera footage packing up his tools, with red marks on his trousers.
Then, horrifyingly, he’d led a Jehovah’s Witness service as if nothing had happened.
He claimed Mum had been alive when he left the house, but bloodstained items were found in a wheelie bin at an address linked to him, and
a hammer was found hidden in a shed at Mum’s home.
Reading out my impact statement,
I said: ‘I am tormented at the thought of what my mum endured. Did she cry out for someone? Those thoughts are torture, but I
can’t get them
out of my head.
‘In her final moments, she
was faced with shocking violence from someone she thought she could trust. Nothing will ever restore or compensate for what we have lost.’
Jailing him for life, to serve a minimum of 15 years, Judge Michael Chambers KC told Norgrove: ‘You used a hammer to repeatedly strike her to the head. You were angry because she had continued to criticise you for your chronic delays and workmanship.’
But to me, the sentence wasn’t long enough.
When he’s released, he’ll
be younger than Mum was when he took her life at the age of 58.
If she’d only told me the full extent of what was happening, I would have stopped it.
I’m outraged that this deceitful man wormed his way into Mum’s home and killed her there — the one place where she should
have been safe.
He pretended to have the same values as her to earn her trust, but he is nothing like she was.
Mum was kind and generous, while he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing —
a cold-hearted killer who has changed out lives forever.
Photos: West Midlands Police