# He Beaten His Parents To Death For An Allowance
There is something sinister about the coastline of the British Isles, which stretches for some 7,000 miles. It is home to grand hotels and picturesque promenades. On the surface, there are bright lights and funfairs, sandy beaches, and beautiful sunsets.
But dig a little deeper in the sand and you uncover an underworld of murder and mayhem. In Coastal Killers, we take a journey to the cliff’s edge, where the land meets the sea and life meets death. A shoreline that is awash with tales of death and depravity.
These are the chilling true stories of Britain’s worst coastal killers.
We are going back in time to 1950s Cornwall today to look at the case of a young man who seemed to have everything to live for. But when Miles Gifford was told that his allowance was going to stop, he reacted in rather an extreme way. He killed his parents.
Porthpean, in the old Cornish language, means little cove, and it is just outside St. Austell. It is a quiet, long beach which attracts visitors, and just behind the beach are tall cliffs.
Those tall cliffs lead to Carrick Cove, the house in which the Giffords lost their lives.
This has got the real makings of an Agatha Christie mystery. It is kind of quintessentially English. You have got the 1950s.
You have got the parents living in some wealth in Cornwall in this kind of idyllic setting. You have got this glamorous young man called Miles living in Chelsea and Hampstead, kind of living it up. And yet, under the surface, there is obviously this kind of not thinking quite right, of wanting to inflict violence on your own parents.
And also the way that he commits the crime is 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔. You cannot quite believe it.
Miles Gifford was the eldest son of a well-to-do Cornish family, an extremely well-to-do Cornish family. His father was a local solicitor in St. Austell.
He was also clerk of the court. His wife was vice chair of the local Conservatives. So they were important figures in town.
Miles was the elder of two children. There were five years between him and his younger brother. So you can see how maybe the family’s expectations and hopes were kind of focused on him as the firstborn.
Miles Gifford grew up in what you might call a fairly well-educated, upwardly mobile, respectable family. A kind of slightly obsessive family that wanted to maintain standards and expected the earth from this poor lad. He was sent to public school, as was common for families of that class and that level of wealth.
He went to Rugby initially. His school report at age 14 said that he should maybe still be in the nursery. He was a chronic liar.
He was a bedwetter, and he did silly things like biting holes in his sheets and stabbing himself in the leg and then being very surprised when it hurt or when it bled.
He had a disastrous time at public school. He was basically considered to be abnormal by his tutors and house masters. He finished bottom of his class and eventually was asked to leave after four terms.
Why was Miles Gifford like that? Well, there was history. Charles Gifford was certainly not a warm and loving parent.
He was hard. He was brusque. He was unforgiving, and he did not tolerate Miles’s occasional outbursts.
His father was very arrogant, a little bit of a bully, and Miles never quite lived up to his expectations. There were rows constantly. Elizabeth was more soft and more forgiving, but Charles ruled that house.
I think the fact that his father ridiculed him, put him down, saw him as a waste of space will have grated on Miles because this was not something that just went on for a week. This was throughout his life, progressively, as he got older and older.
Miles struggled to study, and the only thing that Miles was really good at was sport. He was a very good cricketer, played for the county, and also the same for squash. He had aspirations of being a professional cricketer.
But his father just did not want him to do that. His father more or less ignored the not inconsiderable achievement of Miles in cricket and deserved basically a little bit of praise for achieving in some direction.
Miles was in the Navy during World War II and did two years’ national service afterwards. When he came out, he had grown to be a man. The combination of the discipline and the physical activity really suited him.
He fitted in well there for the first time in his life. But he struggled to make friends. He struggled with every single aspect of his life.
If you look at the Giffords as a family, the father is a very well-respected man. He is a solicitor. He has got a good career.
He has worked as a clerk to the magistrates for many years. So his father is a very respectable member of the community, very successful. This is the grey 50s, and status and class were immensely important.
Miles’s father had actually achieved quite a lot, and he just wanted his son to carry on in his footsteps.
Charles wanted Miles to settle down and knuckle down and work as befitted the son of a senior pillar of the Cornish community, probably in the law. And Miles did take a series of jobs, including working in Charles’s law firm. He never lasted long in any of them.
He wanted to play cricket. That is what he wanted to do. He was a young man living at home with a father with whom he butted heads constantly.
As he kind of slipped from the ideal law career, this would have displeased his father, and he would have felt, “I have failed. I am not what my father wants, and I never will be.” His father was convinced that he would never amount to anything.
He had failed at everything. He did not want him to be a sportsman. He was constantly on at him about his lifestyle.
There was a huge amount of pressure building up in that relationship.
The other side to this though is that Miles Gifford may have actually had mental problems. He had a history of psychiatric problems, and at the age of 14 he was diagnosed with juvenile schizophrenia, a particular type of juvenile schizophrenia. His parents were warned that there was a strong likelihood of him having a nervous breakdown at some stage.
He had been traumatized as a child by what his psychiatrist said was a sadistic nurse who beat him and put him in a cupboard, which then sparked a whole pattern of behavior in which he could not sleep, had nightmares, could not really function at school, and had to be taken out. He ended up being treated for two years by his psychiatrist, who warned the family that Miles may be developing schizophrenia and this could actually get worse as he gets older.
Schizophrenia is a mental condition and it is mostly genetic. It can be triggered by stress. It tends to come on in the kind of late teens to 30s, and it kind of consists of episodes where you have thought disorder, hearing voices, commanding voices, and hallucinations, as well as delusions where you believe something to be true that cannot possibly be true.
So you can act on things which are not basically in reality. Miles had a few what we call negative symptoms of schizophrenia, which are kind of more absences: a lack of drive, a lack of motivation, a lack of a sense of achievement, these kinds of things, an absence of emotions.
Miles had the handicap of schizophrenia. So he would be prone to paranoid feelings, the idea that his life maybe cannot progress while his parents are still alive because they actually put themselves forward as kind of like a ball and chain on his life in his own mind.
The rows carried on. Charles and Miles kept butting heads. In the end, Miles left.
He went to London. He met a girl and was completely and utterly smitten by her. He fell in love almost instantly, and she was the main attraction of his life in London.
Gabrielle was only 19 years old, and Miles was an older man at 26. From all accounts, she was quite an impressionable young girl, and the attentions of an older man were very flattering for her. Really, she provided stability for him.
He saw a future with her.
He goes to London with the benefit of a monthly allowance from his father, and he sets up home, or a house, in a rented room in Walpole Street in Chelsea. To court her, he took her to West End shows and fancy restaurants. Miles’s affections for Gabrielle were such that he suddenly realized his place in life, and it was very low.
He certainly struggled with money. He had a series of dead-end jobs. He worked as an ice cream salesman.
He worked in an estate agent’s office. He was desperate for money really. And she really wanted somebody who was a respectable suitor, someone who would sweep her off her feet and keep her financially, or at least try.
Miles was not in that position.
Very plainly, this was a life without a plan and a life which had a shelf life. All he could see ahead of him was the idea that he could go to his parents and say, “Look, I can make a success of myself. Give me some money, some basic simple handout from your own family to help him in the real world.”
As he saw it, this was his only chance of a good life. And in the end, he said to Gabrielle, “I’m going to go back and see my father and try and get him to give me some money.”
With Miles, it seems to be about money, about being spoiled, about not wanting to work for a living. It is kind of the age-old thing of thinking that your parents owe you a living. But Miles Gifford was about to find out his parents wanted him to make his own way in the world, and he would react in the most brutal way imaginable.
In St. Austell in Cornwall, the Gifford family were about to find themselves at the center of a murder mystery. One that would not have looked out of place in the pages of a best-selling thriller of the day.
Miles Gifford’s case is just fascinating because it is 1950s England. It features an upper-class wealthy family, a son who has been privately educated at public school. He is a county cricketer.
He was living in London, expecting a glamorous lifestyle, but not really willing to take responsibility for it and to pay for it himself.
Miles travels back to Cornwall. He hitches from London to Cornwall. The express purpose of his visit to St.
Austell was to get clothes because Gabrielle complained that he was looking a bit scruffy, and he knew that he could not rely on his father to send him any. So he hitchhiked down to Cornwall to get some. It takes him two days, and he overnights in a rat-filled barn in Somerset.
It is a measure of how footloose and feckless this man’s life is that he is reduced to sleeping in a rat-filled barn before turning up at his father’s home to plead for money.
When Miles went into the house and confronted his father regarding the possibility of a little bit of a loan, maybe he was met with a brick wall. Apparently, there was an argument between him and his father about his allowance. His father threatened to cut off the allowance, which made Miles see red because obviously he relied on this money from his father to maintain this kind of glamorous lifestyle.
His father at that visit decided to terminate his allowance. He allowed him 20 cigarettes a day, a pint of beer, refused to let him go to the pub at all, and refused to let him go back to London to his girlfriend. He was not really given any other option.
So basically he could see two routes. He stays with his family, breaks off with the love of his life, or carries out what was in his mind.
On Friday, November the 7th, 1952, Charles Gifford went, as usual, to his office for work. Elizabeth Gifford that afternoon had one of her regular bridge games. Miles spent the afternoon on the sofa drinking whiskey, swallowing aspirin, and reading, as it happened, a book about a soldier who murdered his family.
He sat around one afternoon thinking, as a slightly inebriated schizophrenic individual, who could only see one way of going back to his girlfriend on an equal standing, and that was to do his father in.
His father arrived back, and as he pulled the car into the garage, Miles pounced on him with a length of pipe that he had retrieved from the garden. A lead pipe, 2 feet long, 3 pounds in weight. So, a big implement.
And he beat his own father around the head with the additional rage he felt and the indignity by which he had been treated all his life. His father would have felt with every blow exactly the emotion behind Miles’s needs and desires.
His father sustained injuries to his hands when he threw up his hands to protect his head. There were also marks to the inside of the car door where the pipe had torn the car door lining. At that point, Miles went into the house, still carrying the lead pipe, and beat his mother around the head.
He smashed the pipe into her head again and again until she too slumped to the floor unconscious.
He then went back to his father, who was still alive, and attacked his father again, killing his father. He then decided that he had to dispose of the bodies. He actually disposed of them by putting them in a wheelbarrow, trekking them along the cliff path, and tipping them over a cliff.
That done, he went back to the house and tried to clean up the mess. He took cloths and water to try and get rid of the blood. He got rid of most of it, but there were still stains left.
He was working against the clock because he knew that the family’s living-in maid was due home from her evening off at any time.
This case is interesting in terms of making us look at relationships with parents and also particularly the role of the mother. The focus of anger is towards the father. The mother is almost like collateral damage, or seen as, “Well, you’re colluding with him.
You haven’t stuck up for me.” A child might punish the mother for not sticking up for them or for siding with the other parent.
It is interesting that the injuries that his father suffers are worse than those that his mother suffers when he confronts her in the kitchen. His father clearly fights back, and his injuries are a lot more extensive, which could be a sign of the fact that his resentment towards his father is much greater. Maybe he hated his mother not perhaps as much as his father, but still hated his mother.
Maybe he had some slight forensic idea that he would have to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his mother in order to get away.
The attacks on his mother and father have been so vicious, so brutal, that Miles is absolutely soaked in blood. His clothes are covered in blood. He brought with him, as he left the house, a change of clothes.
He planned this. And he stopped under cover of darkness in Devon, stripped off the bloodied clothes, put on the clean clothes, and set off to London.
It is 250 miles to Chelsea from there. And in those days, there were no motorways. The roads were dim and narrow and badly lit.
And it took him eight hours to get to Chelsea.
I think that he did not particularly plan to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 them. He may have hated them enough, but his plan, I think, was simply to get money off them and basically just to facilitate this central relationship in his life. Miles could only see one way of going back to Gabrielle on equal standing, and that was to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 both parents, take what he could, and just hope for the best.
I do not think he had much of a forward plan.
Miles claimed to be obsessed by his girlfriend, but I do not think that was a motivation for the death. I think he was more motivated by the fact that he wanted money. He wanted to be able to maintain a certain lifestyle without having to work for it.
And he saw red when he saw that his father was still trying to control what he did.
Gifford’s bloody-minded determination to force his parents to fund his feckless lifestyle would cost them their lives. And the trail of devastation he left behind would see the Cornish police investigating one of the biggest murders in their history.
The sleepy Cornish coastal town of St. Austell was about to awake to the brutal murder of the well-respected Gifford family. Murdered by their son Miles, it would become a crime that few could comprehend both then and now.
Why Miles murdered was a cause of much debate at the time. There was kind of an unwillingness to believe that he could have been sane and still killed both his parents. Yet, it is clear that he was a problematic child and also that he expected life to be given to him on a plate.
He did not really want to work for a living. He wanted to get an allowance from his parents indefinitely. And when his father kind of had had enough and told him no, he needed to be independent and not rely on this allowance, he flipped and basically responded by killing both his father and his mother.
It was kind of fairly obvious that Miles was responsible for his parents’ death and certainly that he had been at their house shortly before or at the time of their deaths. Miles did not really think ahead very much. So, he had rung his girlfriend Gabrielle from the scene of the crime.
He then got into his father’s car after murdering him and driven back home to Chelsea where he lived. And where did he go when he got to Chelsea? He went straight round to Gabrielle Valance’s flat, the flat she shared with her mother in Tite Street.
The maid turns up for work in the morning and cannot find the family anywhere. She is alarmed by what has happened, and the police turn up. She summons the police.
So the police are alerted to this premises by the maid, and they go in. They go into the kitchen, and there is a bit of blood going on there. A bit of an attempt to have cleared it up.
It was not properly clean, but an attempt had been made.
Once they get into the garage, it is a whole different scene. No attempt to clear up at all. They found the place where Miles had bludgeoned his father to death.
It is clear that a crime has been committed. There is blood, and they can see that there is a disturbance in the house. So, it is obvious what has happened.
So, for the detectives that arrived at this scene, it was clearly a scene of two halves. One where in the kitchen something has taken place, but an effort has been made to clear it up. And then in the garage, a whole different scene where there has been no effort at all, almost as if somebody really has had to leave there pretty quickly.
And at that point, the blood inside the house made them believe that someone must have murdered Charles and Elizabeth.
Although forensics was very rudimentary and in its early days back then, it was clear from the scene that greeted the officers that a fairly frenzied, brutal attack had taken place. One where the killer was fairly determined to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. It was obvious that the murderer had had to leave the scene pretty quickly, but in his rush to get away, he had left the murder weapon behind.
He had left some lead piping that he had used to bludgeon his parents to death. And fingerprints in blood were found on that lead piping.
Fingerprints in blood at a crime scene are just invaluable evidence to find. They show that the marks have been left in the blood of the victim after the attack has taken place.
Where are the Giffords? There are no bodies. They cannot see anybody.
They obviously searched the house. Nothing, nobody found. They then extend the search further into the garden and beyond.
Looking around outside, there was a trail of blood leading along the garden path. So, the police followed that, and they followed it to the cliffs beyond. They looked down, and on the cliffs below they saw Charles Gifford’s body.
Even from that distance they could tell that someone had stoved in his head.
The police have seen the bodies at the bottom of the cliff, but they cannot really know how they have got there. So, they have to look at the area to establish how the bodies have been transported there. And in their examination, they find tire marks and some kind of deep indentations.
And it looked like they may have been wheeled to the cliff’s edge in a wheelbarrow and then lifted up and tipped over.
The police then have to go and look and see if their thoughts are correct. And lo and behold, down on the beach are the two bodies of Mr. and Mrs.
Gifford. At that point, the police know it is a double murder. It is the murder of Charles and Elizabeth Gifford.
And the most likely suspect is Miles Gifford.
On the surface, I think he thought by throwing his parents off the cliff, people might possibly believe it was an accident. The injuries they had sustained, people might think had been sustained in the fall over the cliffs. And he could have got away with it, but for the attack and the method of the attack within the house, because it was so frenzied, so bloodied, and such a mess had been made that kind of ruined his plan.
His father had a lot of injuries and defense injuries to his arms. So this was a really vicious attack. There is an extreme level of violence displayed by Miles, and also it is kind of a prolonged period of violence.
You would think that after killing his father, who is the main focus of his anger, that anger would dissipate, but actually it carries on. It enables him to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his mother with still the same level of violence. She had extensive injuries, all believed to have been committed before she died.
One of the most horrific thoughts on this is that the postmortem examination indicated that Mrs. Gifford was most likely alive when she was tipped over the edge. What had killed her was the impact of the rocks beneath on her body and her head.
He has maintained that level of violence until both his parents are dead. And then he calmly goes back into the house and rings his girlfriend in London and is able to leave Cornwall, go back to London, as though nothing has happened.
Miles Gifford knocked on the door of his girlfriend’s flat at 8:00 that morning, and he tells her a pack of lies. He said, “I’m up here. My father’s given me a job to do, and I’m staying in St.
John’s Wood, but I’ll see you later on this afternoon.” Instead, he went straight to Piccadilly Circus and sold his mother’s jewelry, the jewelry he had stolen. He got the equivalent in today’s money of almost £1,000 for it.
He was flush again.
And that afternoon, he took Gabrielle and her mother out to the cinema. He decides to take her and her mother out to see the latest Charlie Chaplin film, Limelight, and then has a whole evening of going to pubs and spending a fairly normal evening with her, as it appears to his girlfriend.
At the same time, police are beginning to search in the streets around the flats. They spot the car, and they set up an observation post. Going to London and finally being able to see his girlfriend with money in his hands and a car.
This is what he wanted. Maybe he knew that he did not have very long, and quite simply he wanted to revel in the moment. So he would do what someone in the early 50s might do to someone that they love.
They take them to the pictures. They will take them for a drink. They will buy everything.
He was somebody who was desperate to impress this lady, even though there may never have been any real future to it.
He is alone with his girlfriend, and he proposes to her, and she says, “Not until you get a job.” So once again, he obviously feels a bit thwarted. At this point in her testimony, she says he was a bit quiet, and he says to her, “I’ve done something frightful.”
And she says, “Oh, what? You’ve pinched your father’s car?” And he says at that point, “No, I’ve murdered them.”
Now, this is such an outlandish thing for her to hear. Of course, like any normal person, she cannot believe him. She thinks he is perhaps just fantasizing or something, and she just carries on the relationship with him as if nothing has happened.
They get in a taxi, and at 10:00 that evening, Miles gets out of the taxi to get into Gabrielle’s flat. And at that point, the police swoop. When he was apprehended, he was actually originally apprehended for car theft, having stolen his parents’ car.
But once he was taken into custody, he told the police that he knew what it was about and that he was prepared to confess everything as long as Gabrielle was not involved.
Miles becomes the archetypal weak middle-class public school boy who wants to try and be friends. “Yes, I’ll tell you everything,” he said to the police. “I’ll try and tell you everything so you and cause you as little trouble as possible.”
And he confesses to what he has done. He confesses to murdering his mother and father and to dumping their bodies.
Ultimately, the police know, and Gifford has confessed that he murdered his parents, and they charge him. The police charge him with double murder.
The murder of one’s parents is termed parricide. With parricide, it is a relatively unusual offense, obviously because it is so horrific. But you tend to find that often the focus is the father, and it is a father-son relationship that has kind of gone wrong in some way, or there is resentment on the part of the son towards the father.
His girlfriend Gabrielle had said that he had been in this argument with his father. His father had threatened to stop his allowance and actually forbidden him from returning to London. He wanted him closer to home.
So he had made it kind of obvious that, A, he had a grudge against his father, and B, that he had been visiting his parents at the time of their death. So he did not really cover his tracks. He was not really thinking or planning properly ahead.
For the once privileged Miles Gifford, the only future that beckoned for him now was a life in prison or an appointment with a hangman.
Miles Gifford had confessed to police that he had murdered his parents. The violent nature of the crime and the fact he came from great wealth made the story a news sensation of the day. Miles is often described in the press as a former county cricketer and a public school boy.
Those are the two most common descriptions of him. He is pictured looking rather young, which he was, mid-20s. He is very dapper.
He is quite good-looking. Looks very neat and presentable.
And it is an interesting choice of description and photograph of him. And it plays to our thinking about what is a murderer. What should a murderer look like?
There would be people reading this account thinking, well, he cannot possibly be a murderer. Look at him. He does not look like one.
And then you realize he is. And you get this awareness that actually anyone can 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁.
The Miles Gifford trial is catnip for the media. This is a wealthy, important local family. Charles’s brother, Miles’s uncle, had been an aide-de-camp to the king.
This is made for the newspapers. It is a brutal double slaying by the son of his parents. It was a media sensation, especially if you take into account the fact that there was a very pretty girl involved and that Miles was a rich and outwardly successful young man.
We are always obsessed with class in this country, and this was certainly true in the 1950s, harking back to the Agatha Christie crimes. There is a certain class of person that she writes about particularly well. And the press were fascinated by this account of this well-to-do young man committing such an awful crime and what sort of a person he was, what his motivations were.
So, you have got this kind of glamorous lifestyle. You have got the fact that he lives in Chelsea, that he has played cricket, he is public school educated. These are all kind of fairly unusual aspects of the crime because the press are more used to writing about working-class crime.
That fits their narrative better, you know, working-class bad, upper-class good. So, it is interesting that this is kind of a different crime in that sense.
He is not some local ne’er-do-well. He was brought up ostensibly in a life of middle-class privilege and wealth. He is a good-looking county cricketer.
You could not find or invent more ingredients to make this the perfect story for the newspapers.
But it also plays to our love of true crime, our love of murder, this desire to kind of scare ourselves. You look at this man and there is kind of this attraction there, and then you feel guilty for having this attraction because you know what he has probably done. He does not meet our expectations of what a murderer should look like.
And that is kind of quite exciting.
We are accustomed now to murder trials taking a long time. Weeks and weeks and weeks. Miles Gifford’s trial lasted three days at Bodmin Assizes.
The judge was fairly unforgiving towards Miles. He pointed out that Miles received a legacy of £750 which he had squandered, as the judge put it, on riotous living in Bournemouth. That was basically the way people saw Miles.
He was pilfering from his parents.
Miles’s crime was so 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔. This man who came from a fine family, killing two prominent members of local society in such a brutal way. It just seems so against the natural order of things.
His trial was very difficult. Obviously they had 12 jurors, 10 men, two women, and the defense that was put forward was an insanity defense. There were very conflicting medical reports at the trial.
The family GP who had known Miles for about 20 years said that he was an idle little waster and that he had no psychiatric problems whatsoever, no mental illness.
There is speculation that he was schizophrenic, that there was a genetic link to schizophrenia in so far as his father was rumored to have had a mental breakdown years earlier. A Harley Street psychiatrist was brought in to testify, and he had seen Miles Gifford three times while he was in custody. He believed that Miles was suffering from something called spontaneous hypoglycemia, which is a sudden unexplained drop in blood sugar.
And spontaneous hypoglycemia can cause all sorts of nasty effects from confusion to irritability to impulsive behavior and a difficulty differentiating between right and wrong.
He is regarded as possibly having low blood sugar, and this caused him to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his father. There is all this speculation about his mental health, whereas other people are just saying no, he is just a waster. That is all that is wrong with him.
He is just lazy and wanted an easy life.
It emerged in court that he had had a nanny when he was a toddler who had punished him by shutting him into a cupboard and beating him. And although the nanny was eventually dismissed for cruelty, it is obviously something that had an effect on him. His psychiatrist who treated him for two years said he has never been mentally normal.
And despite apparent evidence of his trauma as a child and the fact that his life seemed to be sort of imploding a bit, he was not able to function as an adult. None of that counted in his favor at all. There was no sympathy shown for him whatsoever.
The rules for this are set in stone. There is something called the M’Naghten rules, and they have been in existence since the middle of the 19th century. And they say that the only way a defendant can claim and can prove that he was not guilty by reason of insanity is if he can show that at the time he carried out the murder, he did not know what he was doing or that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.
There is this kind of attempt to understand Miles without really doing so. They do not really know what is going on in his head or what he has done or why he has done it. Well, Miles Gifford’s behavior was absolutely crystal clear.
He had motive, means, and opportunity, and at each stage, he had almost documented that. He had even sent Gabrielle a letter at one point during the last few days at Carrick Cove saying, “Things have gone from bad to worse. I can’t see any future unless I do him in,” him being his father.
He had cleaned up the crime scene. He had taken the trouble to change his bloody clothes and dispose of them.
The judge summed up and said, “Would somebody sell their mother’s jewels just after murdering them? Is that sane or is that wicked? These are not the actions of someone who had lost his mind.”
And although psychiatrists said the boy had suffered from depression, had been treated for depression, the jury said no. Miles Gifford is bad, not mad.
Which is a shame really because his schizophrenia in a modern court, untreated as it was, would have been mitigation. There was some debate about whether Miles should have been given a reprieve, and this was based largely on whether he had a mental illness and that had affected why he did what he did. It was ultimately decided that the violence he displayed towards his parents was not so excessive or so maniacal, I think they described it, to suggest that he was out of control, that he was suffering from insanity when he committed the crimes.
They said that there was enough evidence that he had planned what to do, that he had done it in a very calm way, that he had done it whilst completely sane, and therefore there was no reason to give him a reprieve.
The jury spent a rather brutal 35 minutes, a very short amount of time, considering the verdict. And that was that. There was very little sympathy clearly amongst the jurors.
It looks like they could just barely had time to shut the door and take the vote and condemn him.
There is only one sentence for murder at that point. Death. Death by hanging.
Several people actually protested about the death penalty, including the headmaster from the private school that Miles attended after Rugby, which was Blundell’s School, and several members of the public who had known him.
On the morning of February the 24th, 1954, Miles Gifford was led into the execution shed at Horfield Prison in Bristol. Britain’s chief executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, pinioned his arms, put a bag over his head, fastened the noose around that bag, and pulled the lever, which dropped Miles Gifford through the trap door and ended his life.
It is interesting that when Miles was executed, it is reported that there were only newspaper men and police outside of jail in Bristol where he died. And this is interesting in itself because you get the sense that there is kind of this disquiet about, are we doing the right thing? You know, whatever the crimes that somebody commits, especially if there is doubt about their mental state, are we right to execute them?
Is that making us the same as the individual who is killed? So, that is really interesting. It is a really interesting period of our history where we look at what we do with convicted murderers and how we punish them.
We often say with murders that they cause lives to be wasted, and Charles and Elizabeth Gifford’s lives were wasted. They were wasted the moment Miles beat them over the head and dumped their bodies over the cliff edge. But beyond that, Miles Gifford, that is a wasted life.
And it is a wasted life largely by his own indolence. Miles was a layabout. He was a privileged boy who could have done much better if he had knuckled down and if he had actually not been so spoiled.
So he was responsible for much of that waste.
For my mind, Miles had come to a point where he thought he had made something of himself. He had found someone that he cared for, that he was determined would motivate him to get somewhere, to get a job, to clean himself up. He had actually found that.
And then the tragedy is that he is still in conflict with these parents. It is the tragic nature of that.
Miles was guilty of the crime. There is no two ways. I am not sure it was entirely premeditated murder, but it was certainly in the back of his mind as an alternative.
He could not get the money and the car. I do not think with his schizophrenia, if that had actually played a part in his sudden motivation to beat to death his own parents, that he would have hung. I think the death penalty in this case, as with many other people with mental conditions which were not fully taken account of in court, was possibly misguided justice.
Just as his trial had conflicting evidence about whether Miles was a waster or whether he genuinely had mental issues, it is still not clear today who he really was or why he felt parricide was the answer to his problems. The case of Miles Gifford and the murders he committed will perhaps always remain a mystery.
