Emma Ambler has spent hours planning her niece’s birthday party.
She’s ordered a cake from the local bakery, picked out the right number of candles to light – seven – and bought balloons.
But little Lexi won’t excitedly blow out her candles, nor will her older sister Ava watch her unwrap presents. As she has for the past three years, Emma has planned a party for a family which no longer exists.
In March 2020, the two sisters, Ava, four, and Lexi, two, were gunned down by their father Rob Needham, 42, along with their mother, Emma’s twin sister Kelly Fitzgibbons, 40.
Without any clear motive, Needham shot his two daughters at point blank range as they lay under the covers in their parents’ bed, along with Kelly, his partner of 14 years, before turning the shotgun on himself.
Emma lived almost 200 miles away from her sister Kelly (left) in a leafy Birmingham suburb, but the families got together at least once a month
Four years on, Emma, 44, is still struggling to make sense of what happened.
Now, along with her husband Tom and children Lily, 18, and Jesse, 13, she is determined to stop the same tragedy from happening to another family, by calling on the Government to make it harder for people like Needham – who had a firearms licence despite telling lies on his application – to own a gun.
Her campaign has been bolstered last month by the coroner of the Epsom College murders inquest concluding that the Government needs to tighten gun-licensing laws.
Former head of the renowned Surrey school Emma Pattison, 45, was shot dead at her home in the grounds alongside her daughter Lettie, seven, by her husband George Pattison, before he turned the gun on himself.
‘Kelly dedicated her life to her daughters (Ava, four, and Lexi, two),’ Emma says
Like Needham, Pattison, 39, lied to the police in order to obtain a licence.
Emma says: ‘If a child dies, it’s their mum’s job to make sure they are remembered, to fight for their memory isn’t it? But Lexi and Ava haven’t got their mum to do that. So it’s my job, now, to do it for Kelly.’
You could understand how a woman in Emma’s position could easily be consumed with anger and grief, but she speaks to me about the day her sister and nieces were killed – and what must be done to prevent other people like her enduring the same anguish – with composed dignity.
Needham had legally bought a semi-automatic shotgun just nine days before the murders in Woodmancote, West Sussex, claiming that he needed to shoot pigeons.
‘He knew what he was planning to do,’ Emma says. ‘It was premeditated. He was hiding bullets in the laundry basket.
‘The day he killed them, he’d spent the day building a play house for the girls in the garden.
‘I think about that a lot. How could he have done that, knowing they were never going to get to play in it? How could anyone shoot their own children?’
Emma launched the Kelly Fitzgibbons Foundation to support families who lose loved ones in traumatic circumstances
UK law states that anyone is able to apply for a gun licence as long as police decide the applicant is fit to own one following a number of checks. These typically include interviews with GPs to assess their mental health history, visits to the person’s property, criminal records checks, and references from friends.
The applicant also has to have a good reason to possess a gun, such as for work, sport or leisure. Once granted, the licence remains valid for five years.
Needham had been awarded a licence in 2016 – police later discovered he’d omitted a previous conviction for bike theft when he was 25, and failed to disclose he had sought medical help for depression as a teenager.
Emma, who launched the Kelly Fitzgibbons Foundation to support families who lose loved ones in traumatic circumstances, is now campaigning for a tightening of UK gun laws, calling for a ban on keeping guns at home and for licences to be renewed every 12 months.
She is also calling for an increase in application fees, which are currently £88 for a licence and £49 for renewal.
‘If Rob hadn’t had a gun in the house, I know they would all be alive now,’ she says. ‘I’m not daft, I don’t think I can stop people shooting as a hobby. But there’s no need for anyone to keep a gun in their house, unless they’re a farmer or a game keeper.
Kelly Fitzgibbons was murdered by her partner of 14 years, Rob Needham (pictured)
‘They need to be kept at a secure shooting range.’
The struggle of not knowing why Needham killed Kelly, a legal secretary, and the girls, has been particularly hard for Emma. There had been no signs of domestic violence and she describes them as a ‘loving couple, like the perfect family’.
Just hours before she was murdered, Kelly had posted a set of pictures of the family on a walk to Facebook. It was a gloriously sunny day – the first weekend of lockdown.
The images are heartbreaking. In one, the two little girls follow their father adoringly, walking in his shadow.
‘When I saw Kelly post those pictures, I was pleased they seemed so relaxed and happy,’ Emma, a programme manager for the NHS, recalls. ‘With hindsight, I can’t help but look back and think: “Had he taken them all out for one last walk together, knowing what he was going to do?”
Twin sisters Kelly and Emma became particularly close after the death of their mother from leukaemia when they were just 15 , with Emma saying they had a ‘really deep connection’
‘When I was in labour with my daughter, Kelly rang me to ask if I was OK because she’d started having cramps,’ Emma recalls
‘I look back at everything and try to analyse it now.’
Kelly met Rob, a builder, in a bar in 2006 through mutual friends. Her family were pleased for her – he was fun and made her happy. Although they were engaged, they had never got around to getting married, but the family all treated him like Kelly’s husband.
The couple longed to have children and, after trying for years, had started to look into IVF treatment when they fell pregnant with Ava.
‘They were both overjoyed when she was born,’ says Emma. Lexi came along two years later.
‘Kelly dedicated her life to them. They were always baking, dancing – she was the perfect mum.
‘I trusted Rob 100 per cent. I sent my children for sleepovers at their house. He seemed like the perfect father. It makes me shudder now…
‘I have a lot of hatred towards him. But if I’m filled with hatred and anger, I’m another one of his victims. He doesn’t deserve more of my life. Kelly and the girls do.’
Emma lived almost 200 miles away from her sister in a leafy Birmingham suburb, but the families got together at least once a month.
The death of their mother from leukaemia when they were just 15 forged their life-long bond, with Emma saying they had a ‘really deep connection’.
‘People laughed about our “twin connection” – we’d often send people the same birthday card without knowing,’ she says.
‘When I was in labour with my daughter, Kelly rang me to ask if I was OK because she’d started having cramps.
‘We were incredibly close. We spoke every single day, most days two or three times,’ Emma says of her sisterly bond with Kelly (pictured together on holiday in 1996)
‘We were incredibly close. We spoke every single day, most days two or three times.’
So, while Emma trusted Rob, her gut “twin instinct” alerted her that something was wrong that day.
The night before the killings, the sisters had been chatting on WhatsApp as usual.
‘It was late, the children were in bed and we were messaging back and forth,’ Emma remembers. ‘I sent her some videos I’d filmed of the children dancing, and she said my son, Jesse, looked just like me.
‘”Do you think?” I asked. But Kelly didn’t reply.
‘I thought it was strange. I thought maybe one of the girls had got up feeling poorly, or she’d fallen asleep.
‘But the next morning, she still hadn’t replied, and I started to really worry. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was seriously wrong.
‘By 11am, I was beside myself with worry. My husband, Tom, told me to go out for a run, to clear my head.
‘I started running, but it didn’t help. I suddenly burst into tears – I couldn’t explain why. I just had an overwhelming feeling of doom.
‘When I got back, I told Tom: “I think Rob has killed them all.”
‘He started laughing; I understand why – it seemed such an utterly ridiculous suggestion. But I just knew.’
Due to lockdown laws, Emma couldn’t drive to her sister’s house so started calling friends and family who lived nearby to check on them.
Emma is campaigning for a tightening of UK gun laws, calling for a ban on keeping guns at home and for licences to be renewed every 12 months
Emma’s uncle, Ronald Peacock, eventually climbed through an open window at the remote family home and discovered their bodies. The girls were found huddled in their parents’ bed – Ava had been shot in the head, Lexi in the chest. Kelly was found with a defensive gunshot wound to the arm, and a fatal wound to the head.
The bodies of Needham and the family dog, Billy, were discovered nearby.
It was Needham’s mother, Maureen, who lived in a flat adjacent to the house, who broke the news to Emma.
‘She said: “Emma, they’re all dead.”
‘I heard myself scream and fell against the door, the room was spinning. I don’t remember anything else after that. Tom says I went into survival mode, frantically saying I’d need to book time off work.
‘I don’t even remember telling the children. I do remember that we all slept in the same bed that night though. None of us wanted to be alone. We just needed each other.’
At the July 2022 inquest, which recorded a verdict of unlawful killing on Ava, Lexi and Kelly, and one of suicide on Needham, coroner Bridget Dolan KC said: ‘The outstanding question is why these dreadful events happened. His own family said there is no plausible explanation for his diabolical actions and I agree with that.’
It’s a question that still haunts Emma every day.
‘I kept expecting the police to uncover a huge secret – that Rob had another family, that he’d got involved with a criminal gang, that he’d racked up hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt with drug lords – but there were no answers.’
An inquest into the deaths also struggled to find answers for the family.
Police claim Needham had debts of around £30,000 and may have been worried about building work drying up during Covid, and that he and Kelly had been arguing.
Text messages were uncovered where Kelly had asked Rob not to argue in front of the children, and another was cited where she had suggested taking a break.
Emma shakes her head.
‘I don’t believe they had serious money worries, and I don’t think they were about to split up,’ she says. ‘Kelly would have told me.
‘She had occasionally moaned about Rob not pulling his weight around the house, and how he’d sometimes drink a bit more than she would have liked, but nothing that gave me cause for concern.
Emma lived almost 200 miles away from her sister in a leafy Birmingham suburb, but the families got together at least once a month
‘It was just normal, everyday stuff.
‘The police looked at 12,000 messages between them, there were only six that implied there was anything amiss in their relationship.’
The inquest also found that Rob had been a secret cocaine user and had twice tried to buy the drug in the days before killing his family – but no drugs were in his system.
‘We didn’t know any of this about Rob, and we don’t know if Kelly did either,’ Emma says. ‘We don’t even know if Kelly knew there was a gun in her own house.’
Emma’s now working with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Home Office, Jess Phillips, to make it harder for people like Needham to own a gun.
‘At first, I worried it was a bit pointless trying. That people would think: “Why listen to her, she’s just someone’s sister?”
‘But I feel like I have to keep going now. If I can help another family, or even save another family, then I have to try.
‘I don’t want Kelly and the girls to be remembered as murder victims – I want them to be remembered as people who helped change the world for the better.
‘I think Kelly would like that.’
