A Millionaire Businessman Murders His Family After Going Into Debt

In 2008, the Foster family appeared to have it all. Christopher Foster, a 50 year old businessman, lived with his 49 year old wife Jill and their 15 year old daughter Kirstie in considerable wealth.

To those around him, Christopher embodied the role of a devoted husband and father. Neighbours and friends recalled him as doting on his family, lavishly providing them with anything they could wish for.

His mother, Enid, spoke proudly of her son, saying he had always been destined for success. She described Christopher as a “go-getter” from a young age—ambitious, driven, and constantly searching for new ways to make money.

Christopher and his younger brother, Andrew, had both grown up wanting to follow in their father’s footsteps and become successful businessmen. However, Andrew’s relationship with his older brother had been strained since childhood.

While Christopher was confident and assertive, Andrew often struggled with insecurity, finding it difficult to live in his brother’s shadow.

Christopher married Jill in 1987, and six years later, in 1993, they welcomed their only child, Kirstie. Around this time, Christopher’s career took off. After founding a successful company and developing a revolutionary insulation material for use in the oil industry, he became a self-made millionaire.

After witnessing the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988—an explosion on an oil platform that triggered a catastrophic fire, burned for days, and claimed the lives of 167 people—Christopher identified a critical gap in the industry. He saw an opportunity to develop fire-protected insulation for gas and oil rigs.

He named his invention UlvaShield, and it wasn’t long before major oil companies began placing orders.

From that point on, the company boomed, and money began to pour in—far more than Chris had ever imagined. It was no secret that he fully embraced his newfound wealth. As the business expanded, annual turnover rose dramatically, climbing from £50,000 to £1 million.

Chris initially set himself a base salary of £10,000 a month, but before long he was withdrawing more than £15,000 directly from the company’s accounts. By 2004, his personal fortune was estimated to be around £10 million.

As Chris and Jill moved into increasingly elite social circles, he made a conscious effort to distance himself from his former roots. Chris thrived on admiration and envy, taking pride in his material possessions. Social status, it seemed, played a central role in Christopher Foster’s life.

Those who knew Chris described him as an impulsive buyer. His most expensive passion was shooting—a hobby that saw him amass an extensive collection of firearms, many costing an average of £12,500 each. He regularly attended three-day shooting parties, often running up bills of around £8,000 at a time.

Chris and his family wanted for nothing. They enjoyed multiple luxury holidays each year, staying in the finest hotels and dining on the best food money could buy, with individual trips often costing in excess of £20,000.

In hindsight, it was clear that Chris was dangerously overstretching his finances, compensating by withdrawing ever-larger sums from the business. His spending had spiralled so far out of control that more money was flowing out than coming in.

It was in 2004 that Jill, leafing through a magazine, had her attention caught by a striking manor house set in the Shropshire countryside—Osbaston House.

Osbaston House was located in Maesbrook, an affluent village on the Welsh border. Set within 16 acres, the estate featured its own lake and riding paddocks. Although the asking price was £1.5 million, the property required significant work.

Jill fell instantly in love with the house. The very next morning, Chris travelled to view it and put in an offer. Within days, the family had moved in. He went on to spend a further £50,000 landscaping the grounds and added a swimming pool to complete the transformation.

To match the grandeur of his new home, Chris embarked on an extravagant spending spree. He bought two Porsches—one for himself and one for Jill—alongside an Aston Martin, a 4x4, a tractor, three horses, four dogs, and even doves. He employed a housekeeper and a personal assistant, and furnished the interior with more than £200,000 worth of antiques.

Yet beneath the polished exterior, darker aspects of Chris’s personality were increasingly apparent. When the doves fouled his cars, he would sometimes shoot them for target practice. On another occasion, when a Labrador belonging to his daughter Kirstie began worrying the sheep, Chris reportedly took the dog down a country lane and shot it in the head.

Jill Foster was a stay-at-home housewife who, like her husband, enjoyed shopping and a life of luxury. She spent her days having her hair and nails done, with regular trips for beauty treatments such as manicures and Botox.

Their daughter, Kirstie, preferred a quieter lifestyle. She loved spending time with her horses and regularly took part in riding competitions. Friends described her as gentle, caring, and kind.

By 2007, the consequences of Chris Foster’s excessive spending were beginning to catch up with him. His accountant had reported him to the Inland Revenue after he failed to pay substantial amounts of tax.

In an attempt to stay afloat, Chris began borrowing heavily from banks to cover his tax debts. He remortgaged Osbaston House three times and operated more than 20 separate bank accounts.

With bankruptcy now inevitable, his company went into liquidation later that year. Around £3 million worth of his assets were frozen, and his salary was seized.

On one occasion, Christopher reportedly told a friend that he would never leave Osbaston House “unless it was in a body bag.” At the time, the remark was brushed off as a dark joke—without realising how chillingly prophetic those words would prove to be.

Under mounting pressure to maintain appearances—and aware that both time and money were rapidly running out—Chris visited his doctor and was prescribed antidepressants.

Over the August bank holiday weekend in 2008, Chris discovered a letter from bailiffs attached to the front gate of Osbaston House. It informed him that they would return the following Tuesday to repossess the property and seize further assets. The walls were closing in. His debts had now climbed to an estimated £4 million.

Chris stood on the brink of losing everything he valued materially, along with the humiliation he feared from those around him. He was also unable to bear the thought of Jill and Kirstie losing the life they had grown used to. Kirstie would be forced to give up her beloved horses, and the family would have to return to Wolverhampton, leaving their luxury lifestyle behind.

On 25 August, the family attended a barbecue at a friend’s house. They appeared to be in good spirits and returned home shortly before 9 p.m. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, their final movements were captured on the home’s security cameras.

At 11:30 p.m., Christopher went upstairs to check on Kirstie and told her it was time to turn off the Internet and go to bed. Kirstie sent one final message to a friend: "Sorry, Dad's turned the Internet off."

With Kirstie and Jill now asleep upstairs, Chris remained alone downstairs. He sat quietly, flipping through photo albums, revisiting memories of happier times.

Just before 3:30am, Christopher entered Kirstie’s bedroom and shot her while she slept. He then crossed the landing and did the same to his wife, Jill.

Security cameras later captured him taking one of his shotguns to the dog kennels, where he killed the family’s dogs, before moving to the barn and shooting Kirstie’s horses. The CCTV footage shows him setting fire to the barn with the animals inside. Throughout the recordings, Chris appears methodical and detached, with an expressionless, almost robotic demeanor.

In a premeditated act, he drove the horsebox and parked it in front of the main gates, shooting out the tyres to prevent any emergency vehicles from reaching the property.

Chris then ran hoses into the cellar and pumped 200 litres of oil from his domestic tank, determined to destroy Osbaston House and everything inside. If he couldn’t have his material possessions, he made sure no one else could.

The fire ignited rapidly, spreading with terrifying ferocity.

Chris returned to the bedroom where Jill’s body lay and lay down beside her as the fire consumed the house. His estranged brother, Andrew, later suggested that Chris may have welcomed the flames as a form of punishment for what he had done.

Just after 4am, the home’s security cameras went offline. A neighbour, noticing the rising flames, called the emergency services.

Twelve fire crews responded to Osbaston House, but they were initially blocked by the main gate. By the time they managed to move the horsebox, the fire had grown so intense that it could not be brought under control.

In the days following the fire, with the Foster family missing, newspapers and television stations issued appeals to locate them—but there was no response.

Three days later, investigators were finally able to enter the ruins of Osbaston House. There, they discovered the remains of Jill and Christopher bound together on the bed. The bedroom had collapsed through the ceiling into the living area below. However, there was no sign of Kirstie.

Initially, hope remained that she might have escaped, or that she had been taken. But six days after the fire, investigators recovered tiny fragments of her remains among the debris. A piece of her skull indicated that she had been shot in the head.

Locals speculated about the fate of the Foster family, suggesting that the fire may have been caused by an electrical fault—or that someone had deliberately set the blaze.

The truth only began to emerge when investigators examined Christopher Foster’s finances. The deeper they dug, the more they uncovered about the wealthy businessman drowning in debt.

Before long, the home’s security footage revealed the full, horrifying reality of what had happened at Osbaston House.

Enid struggled to accept the shocking news that her son had taken the lives of his family and himself. She refused to believe that Christopher was capable of such an act and, even today, continues to defend him, insisting he acted out of love to protect his family.

Christopher’s younger brother, Andrew, paints a very different picture. The brothers had not spoken for 16 years, following claims that Christopher had bullied him throughout childhood and sexually abused him. Andrew believes that his brother was a controlling and vindictive man who killed his family out of spite.

Four months after the fire, on 19th December 2008, the joint funerals of Kirstie and Jill took place at their local village church. They were laid to rest together in the same plot.

At the request of Jill’s family, Christopher had a separate funeral and was buried apart from Kirstie and Jill.

For several years following the tragedy at Osbaston House, the ruins of the property and the family’s charred belongings remained in place. Among the remnants of Kirstie’s possessions were a first aid book for her beloved horses and a handwritten note detailing the family’s planned meals for the week—small traces of everyday life that had been violently cut short.

The charred remains of what had once been a dream home had been reduced to crumbling ruins.

The rubble was finally cleared in 2011, and the site was put up for sale the following year. It remained unsold until 2014, after the price was reduced. Plans were eventually drawn up for a new six-bedroom house to be built in its place.