- By Lucy Thornton
sNew Year's Day massacre: I saw my stepdad blast my mum to death then he shot me
She ran for her life, jumping to safety from a bedroom window as he went on a rampage at the family home before killing himself
Time after time, the horrific scene of carnage is replayed in Laura McGoldrick’s mind.
She is constantly haunted by the moment when she saw her stepdad Michael Atherton blasting her mum to death with a shotgun.
“She was laughing when she got shot in the back, that’s all I keep seeing – my mam laughing,” says Laura quietly.
“Over and over again, I see my mum laughing, then her head and body arched back as the barrel of the gun moved.”
Atherton wiped out half of Laura’s family – killing mum Susan, 47, aunt Alison Turnbull, 44, and Alison’s daughter Tanya, 24, on New Year’s Day in 2012.
At the inquest into the deaths last month 21-year-old Laura was faced with the murder weapon once again.
“That’s the gun... that’s the gun he killed them with!”, she sobbed with fear at the hearing in Durham as a policeman re-enacted 42-year-old Atherton’s spree.
The taxi driver had also fired at Laura, shotgun pellets left her bloodied and injured.
Laura, who was 19 at the time, ran for her life, jumping to safety from a bedroom window as Atherton went on the rampage at the family home in Horden, Co Durham, before killing himself.
Somehow Laura kept herself together after the tragedy that tore her life apart.
But the re-enactment at the inquest – where it was recorded Susan, Alison and Tanya were unlawfully killed, and Atherton killed herself – was the moment that finally broke her.
“I couldn’t believe it was the actual gun. I was in shock,” she says. “It brought everything flooding back.”
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Laura says the inquest led to a complete mental breakdown. Plagued by suicidal thoughts, she has been forced to seek treatment in a psychiatric unit.
“I can’t laugh any more but I cry every day,” she says.
“I’ve stopped going out, I’ve put on three stone, I won’t answer my phone and I even sold my car because every time I look in the wing mirror I see my mum covered in blood, or him.”
Speaking for the first time since the inquest, Laura has revealed that Atherton abused her when she was a child.
She also claims the killer slept with 12-year-old prostitutes in Thailand. “I want people to know how much of a monster he was,” she says.
The cabbie – known as Big Mick – had been Susan’s boyfriend since Laura was a baby. Her brother, 17, was known as Little Mick. But Laura never saw Big Mick as her dad, and met her father, Susan’s ex-husband, every weekend.
“When we were young everything seemed normal, but I think a lot of things were hidden from me and my brother,” Laura says.
“When I was 12 things started to change with Big Mick.
"There wasn’t a lock on the bathroom door and I would shout that I was in there but still he walked in to have a look.
“Then when I was about 15 he touched me on my private parts as we watched television. I was scared. I hated him from then on.”
On another occasion, she says, he pretended to play-fight in a bid to molest her.
Alongside this secret abuse, Atherton regularly battered Laura’s mum.
Atherton charmed friends into thinking he was a good family man but the reality was very different.
Laura watched helplessly as her mum was beaten during Atherton’s drunken rages.
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Last month coroner Andrew Tweddle called for major gun licensing reform after hearing how Atherton legally owned six weapons despite a history of domestic abuse.
“My mum went to the doctors and hospital about 17 times,” Laura says.
“I watched as he abused my mum all the time, throwing her down the stairs, hitting her with a clock ornament.
“She always had black eyes and bruises all over her body.
“But it was the mental abuse which was worse. He used to get his unloaded gun, come up from behind as my mam sat on the sofa and shout ‘bang, bang, you’re dead’.
“He called Mam fat and ugly and said me and my brother didn’t love her.
“If she went out she had to be covered up completely. But after he hit her he would look after her, bring her food and tuck her in bed. It was sick.”
It got so bad that Laura fantasised about killing him.
Then a week before Christmas 2011, Laura’s mum finally told Atherton the relationship was over.
“He had threatened to hit me and she said they were finished.
“She said he could stay over Christmas and leave in the New Year. I can’t help feeling if I hadn’t told her he’d threatened me, she would still be alive.”
On New Year’s Eve her mum went to a nearby rugby club with her sister Alison, who had hated Atherton since catching him in bed with another woman.
“I’d been out with my boyfriend and we got home before Mam,” says Laura. Atherton was putting his guns on his bed ready for a shooting trip and seemed to be in a good mood.
But the atmosphere changed when he realised Susan was not with Laura, and was out with the sister he loathed.
He drove to the rugby club and attacked the women. “Mam and Alison came back and told me he had punched Mam. When he arrived I screamed at him for hurting her and he left.
“We were in the kitchen when he came back in with the gun.”
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Peterlee shooting victims
Then as if he was shooting rabbits, he targeted his victims one by one. “I could see his eyes popping out and focused,” Laura says.
“He was hunting us and I knew I was next. It felt like everything was really still for a very long time but it was just seconds.
“I feel so guilty. I wish I had run towards him and tried to push him over. But me and my cousin ran together. Our blood was mixed in together on the dining room walls.
“She took most of the shot. I could feel pain but I didn’t really realise my shoulder had pellets in it.
“I kept running upstairs. I was covered in blood. I thought it was my mam’s but it was my cousin’s.
"He fired again at Tanya. He shot her twice. I still think he was trying to get me.
"My boyfriend was upstairs in my bedroom. I told him ‘I’ve been shot – Big Mick’s got a gun and he’s shot my mam’.
"He didn’t believe me at first and started checking me over.
"I told him there wasn’t time and we jumped out of the window on to the sloping roof and ran to my neighbours.”
Laura was left with pellets in her shoulder, wrist and breasts.
After that terrible night she had a portrait of her mum tattooed on her right arm and the poem she read at her mum’s funeral inscribed on her back.
Her mother’s ashes are blended in the tattooist’s ink.
“I still text her and try to phone her,” says Laura.
“I tell her I’m sorry. I feel I let her down by running away.”
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