'He said he had a surprise for me'

Mozart’s Fantasia in D Minor is a complex piece for a 14-year-old. A slow start, a tragic section, fast scales, a slower pace and a jolly ending. Mark*, halfway through his weekly piano lesson with Christina Thomson-Jones, played it with assurance.

Then he said he had a surprise for his teacher. He often brought her gifts — fudge, chocolate, a candle — if his family had been away. “You’ve got to stand and face me and close your eyes because that’s what you do with surprises,” he said.

“Oh, I hope it’s a nice surprise,” Thomson-Jones replied.

Next Thomson-Jones received what she thought was a powerful punch in her stomach. “That’s your surprise,” her pupil said. He had stabbed her with an 8-inch kitchen knife.

“I was so shocked, I didn’t feel any pain. For a brief moment I thought it was one of those toy retractable knives and that was my present. Then it dawned on me that it wasn’t. Mark looked petrified and astonished and we stared at each other. He stood up, walked towards me and said: ‘I am sorry, Mrs Thomson-Jones’.

“Then he started on my face, lashing out with the knife. I heard it knock against my glasses and felt it against my eyebrows and cheeks. I tried to fight him off but he’s a strong, wiry young man.”

Following the attack on Thomson-Jones’s face, Mark selected another kitchen knife with a 4-inch serrated blade, which he used to stab the back of her head as she staggered outside. “I got to the front gate and Mark pushed me into the flower bed. I thought he’d put his finger in my mouth to shut me up. But it seems that the blade cut through my cheek. We then started wrestling and I tried to whack him as I continued to shout and scream.”

Mark ran off, leaving Thomson-Jones staggering across the road, finally reaching a neighbour’s house. She later underwent three hours of surgery to 11 wounds which needed 50 stitches.

Last year Mark admitted wounding with intent and he is now serving a six-year sentence in youth custody. Thomson-Jones is permanently scarred and no longer able to play professionally.

She also remains unable to understand the attack, as do the police. What makes a middle-class, intelligent and musically gifted 14-year-old attack a woman whom he knows well and to whom he has always behaved with courtesy? Mark was studying for high-grade exams on two instruments, one of which was the piano. He had a good singing voice. “He was talented, a delight to teach,” Thomson-Jones recalls.

“He would tell me jokes and was always interested in news of my other pupils. He was well-mannered and though he could be cheeky he was never offensive or disrespectful. My other pupils use my full name but Mark always called me Mrs TJ.”'

So why did he attack Thomson-Jones, an elegant woman of 50, divorced with sons of 20 and 13, at her home in a North Yorkshire town? When police found Mark in the market square after the attack he was quiet and unassuming and seemed neither distressed nor disturbed. Police inquiries involving his parents, friends and teachers failed to find a motive. He was popular, sociable and appeared to have no enemies. He did, however, have trouble recalling what had happened during the attack and said he was unaware of the injuries he had caused.

He had intended only to cut his teacher to convince his parents that he wanted to give up one of his instruments to play football, he told police. He thought his parents would be unhappy about that and he saw injuring his teacher as a way out.

This explanation is the first clue to understanding Mark. Most 14-year-old boys, after all, are interested not in the rigorous demands of learning to play musical instruments to a high standard, or anything that constitutes study, but in sport, computer games, hanging around with their friends, fitting in with their friends. They hate to be perceived as different.

Did Mark feel constricted by the demands of almost daily practice? His parents drew up a schedule to manage his time so that on most days he could fit in half an hour’s practice on both instruments, Thomson-Jones says.

After a half-hour class on one instrument, his father drove him to Thomson-Jones’s for his hour-long lesson.

“I can only think it was a sudden eruption of protest and I was in the way, rather than it being a personal thing against me,” Thomson-Jones says. “I always thought he was fond of me, as I was of him. I certainly never put him under any pressure to attend, though I think there was a certain amount of it coming from his parents. They wanted the best for Mark, but I never got the impression that they forced him into the lessons. A couple of my friends have suggested that maybe he took out a sense of resentment on me instead of his parents, but I don't know.”

Further clues to the background to Mark’s violent behaviour lie, inevitably perhaps, in his early childhood: he was adopted at the age of five and before that he had stayed with at least three sets of foster parents.

At the court hearing a psychologist said that Mark was suffering from post-traumatic stress from his early years in care and foster homes. It was also said that after early childhood traumas he had cut himself off from his emotions, and that he was insecure and avoided confrontation. The defence counsel said: “What happened that day is deep-rooted in this child’s history.”

He had never mentioned his background to Thomson-Jones. “Pupils do use you as a dumping ground, maybe moaning about homework or jobs they have to do. Mark was no different, though in the seven years he’d been my pupil he never mentioned that he was adopted or had been in care.”

The week before the attack he had told Thomson-Jones that his PE teacher had said he could be a world-class footballer and that he wanted to do less music. “I said fine, but maybe he should consider keeping on with his music and that he could do both. The matter was left and Mark seemed OK.”

(In court, Mark’s claim about his footballing skills was revealed as an exaggeration: his teacher had said he could play at area level.)

On the day of the attack he arrived at 5pm as usual. “I used to leave out a snack for him in case he was hungry. I called him into the room and he bounded in, his usual ebullient self. He was quite giddy as he was preparing to play at a local festival for which he was being paid. It was his first gig,” Thomson-Jones recalls. “He mentioned again about giving up his music because of football and that he wanted to be a footballer and not a professional musician. I said that if he wanted, I’d have a word with his parents about it and maybe do a shorter lesson. He replied that he liked coming and agreed to begin the lesson.

“He seemed twitchy and kept looking at his watch. I asked him to stop it and take it off. I wonder now if he was timing when to attack me.”

After Mark was sentenced Thomson-Jones embraced his parents in a gesture of forgiveness and sympathy. “I feel so sorry for them. I wanted to help them feel better. What else can you do?” she shrugs.

She has recently undergone surgery to make the scar on her neck less noticeable, and she will need further plastic surgery. She also sees a psychotherapist and has sought alternative remedies to help her to sleep.

“I’m unable to play the horn to the standards I did. I’ve played it since I was ten and now I feel my life is incomplete. I go over the attack time and time again. Why didn’t I know that he was about to try to kill me? I live with it all the time. Undoubtedly I have changed. I am always on the alert now. I also make extra sure that any pupils are coming because they want to.”

*Mark is not the pupil’s real name

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