In February 1995 keyboard player Sean Mayes walked into a London police station to make a .
More than twenty years earlier his mother had brutally murdered his brother and he and his grandad had helped her bury his body.
He had , but now in the last stages of an AIDS-related illness and with just months to live, he decided to come clean and give his younger brother the dignified funeral he’d never had.
The incredible but harrowing story received little coverage at the time, but author Simon Farquhar delved back into the case to discover why Oscar’s mother decided to kill her son and why Sean almost took the secret to his grave.
Simon, who revisited several forgotten murder cases for his new book, A Deafening Silence, says: “The story is just so mind-boggling. You think of the dilemma that Sean must have gone through. ‘What do I do? I love my mother. If I go along with this and keep the secret I am risking a prison sentence. But if I say something I am guaranteeing my mother life imprisonment.’”
READ MORE:
Sean and Oscar Mayes - who was christened Roderick but couldn’t pronounce his Rs so took the name Oscar - lived with their mother Joy and grandfather Tom in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset, after the boys’s jazz trumpeter father Chick Mayes walked out.
Intelligent Sean won a place at Cambridge University to read philosophy and had clearly inherited his absent father’s musical talent, playing keyboards in a band.
But younger brother Oscar struggled with being in his talented older brother’s shadow and turned to drink and drugs, spending his days smoking weed, taking LSD and listening to music with various waifs and strays he invited round.
The drugs were obviously taking their toll on his mental health and he would have blazing rows with his family who felt that Oscar and his cronies were taking over the house.
But one day he just disappeared with Joy, Sean and grandad Tom telling everyone who asked that he had run away to London with a bunch of hippies.
Because of Oscar’s lifestyle, everyone believed it to be true. Except it wasn’t and the real truth was much more sinister.
Joy was struggling to cope with Oscar’s behaviour, and fearing he was going to be sectioned, drugged him before battering him with a metal boot scraper.
When she found he was still breathing, she cut his throat with a kitchen knife.
She and grandad Tom then waited for Sean to return from touring with his band to help them dispose of the body.
Simon Farquhar says: “It is such a vivid tale and I have never heard anything quite like it before or since. It flies in the face of everything we think of a mother’s protectiveness of a child, yet that seems to have been the motivation for it.”
Joy and Tom sold the house and Sean went on to become a highly successful musician, working with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Tom Robinson and, most significantly, David Bowie, playing keyboards on the Lodger album and as part of his touring band in the late 1970s, immortalised on the live album, Stage.
But in the early 1990s, Sean was diagnosed with AIDS and, despite his determination to tackle the illness head-on, his health deteriorated rapidly.
With just weeks to live, and with his mother and grandfather now both dead, he walked into Paddington Green Police Station and told officers he had something to confess before it was too late.
Sean revealed: “In 1972, my younger brother, Oscar, disappeared, and my mother told everyone that he’d run off to London with a band of hippies. He didn’t. He’s buried in the back garden of our old house in Weston-super-Mare.”
Sean told the amazed officers that Oscar had been getting out of control, and a girlfriend who was a nurse had told his mother, Joy, that he would probably end up in a padded cell.
Unable to bear the thought of this, Joy decided to kill her son. She sedated him by drugging his cocoa, then battered his skull in with a metal boot scraper. Discovering that he was still breathing, she went to the kitchen, returning with a large knife, with which she cut his throat.
Four days later, when Sean returned from Switzerland, where he had been touring, she told him what she had done, and with his help and that of her father, wrapped the body in a heavy plastic sheet and a candlewick bedspread.
Son, mother and grandfather then tipped it from the first-floor bedroom window into the back garden, where Sean had dug a shallow grave. After burying him, the three made a pledge never to share with another living soul what had happened.
Twenty-three years later, on 9 February 1995, after making his confession, the dying Sean led an incredulous police team back to the house and pointed them to the corner of the back lawn where they were to dig. The body was discovered just 18in below the surface, remarkably well preserved due to the plastic sheeting. A decision was made not to prosecute Sean, who lived just long enough to finally give Oscar a dignified funeral.
Mike Robinson, the police officer who was in charge of the inquiry that followed Sean’s confession, told the local press at the time: “In a way it was a relief for Sean to finally unburden himself. For 25 years he carried the guilt with him, but he did it out of love for his mother. He loved and respected her very much and appreciated the support she had given him in his education and music career, and in a way he felt he owed her something.
“When we launched the murder investigation, he was calm and helpful and gave us all the details that he could. He wanted to get this sorted out. This case was the strangest and most tragic that I have ever come across and, in a way, at least Sean can rest in peace now.”
He later told author Simon Farquhar: “As I remember it, the officers in London weren’t interested when Sean made his confession at the police station, since it wasn’t their patch. Instead, he took a train down to Weston. I was the officer who spoke to him. He was clearly at the very end, five stone, soaking wet and, to be honest, barely alive. Some years later, I saw a repeat of an old episode of Top of the Pops where he was playing keyboards and so saw what he’d looked like before his illness, but he was nothing at all like that by now.”
Sean organised his brother's funeral at Weston-super-Mare Crematorium, and in his eulogy he even recounted his death and his own part in it.
He said: “Oscar had a strange life – and death. As a child, he was small for his age and was teased by the other boys and made very few real friends. Then in his early teens he had his tonsils removed, and he shot up by about a foot in a year. After that he was all right with the other boys, though having the name ‘Roderick’ and not being able to pronounce his Rs was always a problem.
“We played together as children, happily scrapping or acting out some game I invented. Much to the family’s surprise, he passed his 11-plus, and attended Heles School, the local grammar school in Exeter. He was not a brilliant child, and he tended to learn things slowly by an act of will and concentration. He taught himself to play chess and played for the school. He also taught himself blues guitar, piano and harmonica.
“When we moved to Weston, he went to the college and later got a job at Marconi’s in Chelmsford, but he became heavily involved in drugs, taking the rap for a friend who would have gone to jail if he had been convicted. Inevitably, he lost his job and never found another one. He started taking LSD as a recreational drug. He also returned home, so I saw more of him, but we had grown apart though still fond of each other.
“The drugs seemed to alter his whole personality. He became aggressive and argumentative at home and ended up having blazing rows with us. He used to invite his friends home for drinking and smoking parties, playing music very loudly, and he seemed to be taking over the house. He was getting so bad my mother thought he was damaging his brain. A girlfriend, who was a nurse, told her that if he carried on like this he would end up in a padded cell. So our mother decided to end his life before that could happen.
“One night she killed him. I was out of the country when this happened, but when I returned a few days later, she told me, and together with my grandfather helping, we buried him in the back garden, wrapped in black plastic. There he remained for twenty-three years, undisturbed, undiscovered.
“A year or so later we sold the house and moved to London, where my grandfather died of cancer. Joy died three years ago, after which I realised I could now feel free to tell the truth about this terrible incident. I never really came to terms with his death, but I decided to support Joy, and told her I thought she had done the best thing. It has been a great relief to be able to tell the truth at last and for Oscar to have a proper funeral.”
The police treated Sean sympathetically and decided not to prosecute. He died in July 1995 aged 50. He had kept diaries of his days touring with Bowie in 1978, but he never lived to see the book he wrote published. Life on Tour with David Bowie: We Can Be Heroes came out for years after his death.
Simon Farquhar adds: “I wish to god I’d been able to speak to Bowie about it, because he must’ve known about it at the end. He wrote the programme notes for Sean’s tribute concert. Just bizarre.”
A Deafening Silence: Forgotten British Murders by Simon Farquahar is published by The History Press on 14 November
READ MORE:
