After Taking This Family Portrait, He M.u.rdered Them All

 3 days. That is how long it had been since Shawn Blake received the worst news of her life. 3 days since a consultant neurologist sat across from her and confirmed what the tests had been pointing toward for 2 years, that she had motor neurone disease. Terminal progressive. A death sentence measured not in decades but in months.

 She was 43 years old. She had two little boys, Zachary, 8 years old, and Ammon, four. She had been an actress once, a familiar face on one of Britain’s most beloved soap operas. She had walked away from all of that, quietly, to build something smaller and more real. A life as a sign language teacher, a mother, a woman trying to hold herself and her children together in a home that had become increasingly difficult to live in.

 3 days after that diagnosis, on the 14th of December, 2015, Shawn Blake and her two sons were murdered inside their own home. Their bodies were buried in the garden. And the man who killed them, the man who beat them, who used a bladed weapon on each of them to make sure they were dead, who then repainted the house, took Shian’s mobile phone and used it to send messages pretending she was still alive,  and boarded a flight to Ghana, was the father of those two little boys.

the man who had shared that house with them. The man can had been trying to leave. He killed her because she was leaving. He killed the boys because they would have gone with her. He killed a woman who was already dying because he could not bear to be the one she left behind.

 How does a family disappear and nobody finds them for nearly 3 weeks? Why did the police walk away from that house on the very day they were called?  And what does it tell us about power, about control, about the deadly mathematics of leaving? That Shian Blake was never more in danger than the moment she decided to save herself.

 Stay with me until the end of this story because the truth of what happened inside that house in December 2015.  Every detail laid out by the judge at sentencing is something every person watching this channel needs to hear. Welcome back to Vanished Women and Children. If you are new here, subscribe and hit the notification bell right now.

Drop a comment and tell me where in the world you are watching from. Now, let’s get into it. Warning, this is a true crime story. The following program contains real events that include violence and sensitive topics. Some viewers may find certain details disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised. To understand what happened to Shaun Blake, you first have to understand who she was.

 Not the headline version, not the shorthand of former East Enders actress that every news report leads  with, but who she actually was. The woman who had built and rebuilt her life  by the time December 2015 arrived. Shian Samantha Blake was born on the 14th of September 1972. She grew up in London and by the time she was in her mid20s, she had found her way into acting in the way that many young British performers do.

 Small parts, auditions, the grinding uncertainty of a career that offers no guarantees. She worked as a telephone receptionist at a doctor’s surgery to pay the bills. And then in 1996, she got the kind of break that changes everything. She was asked to audition for East Enders, initially for a minor role as a nurse,  but she impressed the producers so thoroughly that they encouraged her to go for something bigger.

 Frankie Pierre, a soul singer, a character with real story lines and real screen time. She was signed on a six-month contract. The contract was extended. She appeared in 56 episodes across 1996 and 1997 and became in the way that East Enders characters do  genuinely recognizable across Britain. She left the show after receiving hate mail.

 Viewers unable to separate the actress from the character. Frankie Pierre was written as a woman who had an affair that broke up a marriage on screen directed real hostility at Shawn herself. She walked away. She went on to smaller roles in the bill, doctors, casualty and skins. She directed plays. She acted in theater.

 And then quietly she stepped away from performing altogether and reinvented herself as something entirely different. A sign language teacher and interpreter. She learned British sign language and built a new career in it. patient, skilled work that required a particular kind of attentiveness and care for communication for the people in front of her.

  She was also a mother. She had two sons with Arthur Simpson Kent, her partner. Zachary, born in 2007, named by his mother for the seriousness she wanted him to carry in life. Aman born in 2011, four years old at the time of his death. Still at the age where the world is mostly made of cuddles and questions and the particular magic of being small enough that adults carry you when you are tired.

 They lived in a house on Pemrook Road in Aith, a suburb in the London burrow of Beexsley in southeast London. Aith sits along the south bank of the Tempames. Not glamorous, not the London of postcards, but a real place where real people live real lives. That house was Shaun’s home. It was her boy’s home, and by the end of 2015, it had become somewhere she was desperately trying to leave.

 Arthur Simpson Kent was 48 years old in December 2015. He had been with Shawn for years and was the biological father of both Zachary and Aean. Beyond that, the public record of who he was before the murders is limited. He was not before that December a name that anyone outside Sean’s immediate world would have known. What emerged at the time of the sentencing, through the judge’s remarks, and through accounts from Cion’s family painted a portrait of a relationship that had deteriorated into something suffocating and frightening. Shian’s sister told the

press that Shian had wanted to end the relationship with Simpson Kent a long time ago. The judge noted that the relationship between Simpson Kent and Shian Blake’s family was not good. There was little if any contact between the two sides. The boys,  Zachary and Aean, had not been enrolled in formal school.

 That detail about the boys schooling is worth sitting with. Two children  of primary school age, not attending formal education, isolated from the institutional contact that might have given teachers, social workers, or other professionals  a window into what was happening inside that house. And what was happening by the accounts given in court was this.

Shan had decided she wanted out. She was going to take the children and leave. She may have been making plans. Whether she had begun the process of actually separating or whether she was still in the preparation stage is not something the public record fully resolves. But her intention was clear enough that  when the judge came to deliver his sentencing remarks, he identified it as the direct trigger for what Simpson Kent did.

 He could not accept her leaving. >>  >> He could not accept losing control of the family that he had come to see as his possession to keep. And so he made a decision premeditated. The judge would later say, plan to a substantial degree that if Shawn was going, none of them would be going anywhere. There is a detail in this case that stops you cold the moment you understand its full implications.

 On the 11th of December 2015, 3 days before the murders, Shiion Blake attended an appointment with Mr. Haden, a consultant neurologist who had been following her case for more than 2 years. She had first shown neurological symptoms in September 2013. The investigations had been ongoing. The possibilities had been narrowing. On December 11th, Mr.

 Haden confirmed the diagnosis motor neurone disease terminal. He prescribed medication to slow the progression and referred her to the motor neurone disease clinic.  He later told the court that Shiion seemed distressed and depressed at that appointment. He took this to mean she had accepted the reality of her terminal illness. She was very weak.

 She could barely make movements with her hands. She could still walk, but the disease was progressing. Think about what was happening in that house during those three days between her diagnosis and her death. A woman had just been told she was going to die from a progressive, incurable disease. She was already weak.

 She was already struggling to use her hands, the very hands she had learned to use so fluently and precisely as a sign language interpreter. She had two young children who depended on her completely. And she was trying to find a way out of a relationship with a man who had already made clear through years of control and suffocation that he was not going to make leaving easy. Mr.

 Justice Singh, sentencing Simpson Kent at the Old Bailey in October 2016, noted plainly that Shian’s condition made her particularly vulnerable at the time of the attack.  She was not able to fight back in the way another person might have been. She was physically compromised by her illness. And Simpson Kent knew it.

 He killed her anyway because of it, perhaps because the window he imagined she might escape through was closing as her illness progressed and he could not risk her using it. The 13th of December, 2015 was a Sunday. Cheyenne Blake and her two boys were last seen alive on that day. The exact sequence of events inside the house at Pemrook Road on that afternoon and evening is known only from what Simpson Kent later told a forensic psychiatrist.

 A statement that was read into the record at the Old Bailey and that forms the most harrowing section of this entire story. The judge quoted directly from the psychiatrist’s report during sentencing. Simpson Kent told the psychiatrist that on the afternoon of the 13th, he attacked Shian. He had an axe. He described the attack. He described how when it was over, he went into the rooms of his two sons, both of them asleep, Zachary in his room, Aean in his, and attacked them with the same weapon, intending to kill them as quickly as possible. The judge quoted

the psychiatrist’s record. He said he would not have been able to attack them if they had not been asleep. Neither child woke up. He then moved the boy’s bodies.  He brought Shien’s body into the same room. He went to the kitchen and got a knife. He used it on each of them to make certain they were dead.

 He then told the psychiatrist that his plan had been to kill himself next. He stood there with the knife and he did not do it.  Instead, he began to cover his tracks. He attempted to clean the house. He repainted sections of it. The judge noted this explicitly  as evidence of premeditation and deliberate concealment of his crimes.

 He took Shian’s mobile phone. He used it to send messages in her name,  making it appear that she was alive, that she had taken the children away to visit a friend in Cambridge, that there was nothing to investigate. The phone would ping off mobile network towers as it traveled with him, reinforcing the impression that Shawn Blake was out there somewhere, alive and unreachable.

On the 19th of December, Arthur Simpson Kent boarded a flight from the United Kingdom to Ghana. On the 16th of December, three days after the murders, six days after Shaun’s terminal diagnosis, a family member reported Shawn and the children missing to the Metropolitan Police. Officers visited the house at Pimbrook Road on the afternoon of that same day.

  Simpson Kent was there. He was uncooperative. Eventually, he let the officers inside. He told them that Shiion had been feeling overwhelmed by the tension between him and her family and that she had decided to take the children to visit a friend in Cambridge. The officers left. That visit, those officers standing in a house where three bodies were buried in the garden,  being told a story about Cambridge and leaving became one of the central points of the investigation into police conduct that followed. The

Metropolitan Police referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission on the 6th of January, 2016, acknowledging that an initial review had highlighted some potential issues regarding the handling and grading of the missing person’s investigation. The family were asking questions from the start.

 Shiion’s aunt, who gave her name only as Terry, told the London Evening Standard that relatives wanted a full investigation. The police did take a long time to find the bodies, she said,  and the family want answers. Canon’s car was found on the 3rd of January, 2016, abandoned in Bethl Green.  It was not until the 5th of January, 23 days after the murders, 19 days after the family had reported them missing,  that police searched the house at Pemrook Road and found three bodies buried in the garden.

 23 days. Shian Blake and her two sons lay in the ground of their own garden for 23 days while their family asked questions while police moved slowly while Simpson Kent sat in Ghana. Zachary was 8 years old. Aman was four. They had been asleep when their father killed them. They had not woken up.

 When Simpson Kent fled to Ghana on the 19th of December, he may have believed he had bought himself time or perhaps more. Ghana, his country of heritage, where he might find community, distance, the possibility of slipping into a life beyond reach. He was arrested on the 9th of January, 2016. Scottish Yard confirmed that Ganaan police had detained him in a cra.

 He was remanded for 2 weeks. On the 26th of January, he appeared at an extradition hearing in the Ganaan capital.  He told the court he would return to the United Kingdom voluntarily without waiting for the formal extradition process to run its course. On the 12th of February 2016, Arthur Simpson Kent stepped off a plane at Heathrow Airport.

 Officers were waiting for him.  He was arrested on the tarmac and charged with the murders of Shenne Blake, Zachary Blake  Kent, and Aean Blake Kent. On the 10th of June 2016, he appeared at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, the most significant court in the country for criminal proceedings, and entered guilty pleas to all three counts of murder.

 He did not contest the charges. He offered no alternative version of events. He simply admitted in the formal language of a criminal proceeding  that he had killed his partner and his sons. On the 5th of October 2016,  Mr. Justice Singh sentenced him. The judge did not hold back.

 He said the manner of the killings was truly horrific. He noted that the murder weapons, the axe, and the knife had never been recovered, meaning Simpson Kent had disposed of them somewhere between the murders and the police search. Another act of deliberate evidence destruction.  He noted the repainting of the house, the use of Shan’s phone to send false messages, the flight to Ghana.

 All of it, he said, was evidence of a substantial degree of premeditation or planning. He noted that Shan, at the time of her murder, had been particularly vulnerable due to her terminal diagnosis and physical condition. He noted that the two boys had been asleep, that they had not woken up,  that Simpson Kent himself had acknowledged he would not have been able to kill them if they had been awake.

 A statement that tells you something unbearable about what he knew he was doing and did anyway.  He noted the abuse of trust, that these were Simpson Kent’s own children, sleeping safely in their own beds  in the home of the man who was supposed to protect them. Arthur Simpson Kent was given a whole life order. In the English legal system, a whole life order is the most severe sentence a judge can impose.

 It means exactly what it sounds like. There is no parole. There is no release date. Barring a decision by the Secretary of State  on exceptional humanitarian grounds, typically only granted when a prisoner is terminally ill and near death, Arthur Simpson Kent will die in prison. His appeal filed in June 2017 was thrown  out.

 The judges concluded that the whole life order was entirely appropriate. He remains in prison today. The Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the Shiion Blake missing person’s inquiry raised uncomfortable but necessary questions. When officers visited the house on the 16th of December  and were told by Simpson Kent that Shian had taken the children to Cambridge, they left.

 They accepted that explanation. They did not escalate the investigation. They did not treat the disappearance of a woman and two young children reported by a concerned family member with no independent confirmation of the Cambridge story  as the emergency it was. The bodies were in the garden. 3 ft of soil above three people whose family was already asking questions, already ringing the police, already saying something was wrong.

 We do not know, and the public inquiry findings do not fully establish whether a faster, more aggressive initial police response would have found Shann and the boys before Simpson Kent fled. By the time the family reported them missing on the 16th,  Shiion and the boys had already been dead for 2 to three days.

 The murders could not have been prevented at that point. But what a faster response would have done is this. It would have found their bodies sooner. It would have prevented Arthur Simpson Kent from boarding a flight to Ghana on the 19th of December and spending nearly 3 weeks on the other side of the world while three people he had killed lay in a garden and their family was told there was nothing to be concerned about.

 It would have meant Shian’s family did not spend those three weeks not knowing. It would have meant Zachary and Ammon’s names were known sooner  and the hunt for their killer began sooner and the whole apparatus of justice  moved faster. Those are not nothing.

 For a family living through that uncertainty, calling the police, being told it was probably fine, watching days disappear without answers, those weeks were their own kind of suffering,  and they were avoidable. The murder of Shaun Blake and her sons is described  in academic and legal contexts as a family annihilation, a term that attempts to categorize what happens when a person, almost always a man, kills his partner and children rather than allow the family to separate.

 The term is useful. It captures the pattern. But it can also, if we are not careful, become a way of speaking about these cases at a distance that protects us from the specific human reality of what happened. The specific human reality is this. Shian Blake was trying to leave. She had been trying to leave for a long time.

Her sister said she had been diagnosed 3 days before her death with a terminal illness. She was physically weakening. She had two children who depended on her. She was trying to work out how to get herself and those boys out of a house and away from a man who the relationship had become untenable with. The moment she became most vulnerable medically, physically, emotionally was also the moment she became most dangerous to him.

 Because a woman with a terminal diagnosis is a woman who has nothing left to lose. A woman who is going to die anyway has less reason to stay, less reason to keep the peace, less reason to wait for the right moment, and more reason to get her children out now while she still can. And he could feel that  whatever else Arthur Simpson Kent was.

 He understood that his control over that household was ending. He understood that she was about to go and rather than let her, rather than accept the end of a relationship he had come  to see as his to own, he chose to end everything else instead. This is what the research on domestic homicide tells us.

 Consistently and clearly,  the most dangerous moment for a woman in a controlling relationship is not when the abuse is at its worst. It is when she tries to leave. The act of leaving or being perceived as about to leave is the trigger that transforms controlling partners into killers more often than any other single factor.

 Canon Blake knew this on some level. The planning it takes to leave a controlling relationship quietly, carefully without provoking the explosion is exhausting and complicated and requires a level of strategic thought that most people never have to apply to their own safety. She was doing that thinking while managing a terminal diagnosis, raising two young children, and living in a house with the man she was trying to escape.

 She did not get out in time. She needed more help than she received from the systems around her. From the institutions that might have seen what was happening, from a society that still in 2015 and today does not always move fast enough when a woman says she needs to leave. Every story about Shawn Blake in the weeks after her murder led with the same line, former East Enders actress.

  It was accurate, but it was also in its way a reduction because Shaun Blake at 43 was so much more than something she had done for 18 months of her life in her mid20s. She was a woman who had learned British sign language and built a second career from it. a career that required patience and dedication  and genuine care for the people she was communicating with and for.

 She was a woman who had made her own choices about what kind of life she wanted to live. Stepping away from the spotlight not because she had failed but because she had decided there were more important things. She was a mother who even as her body was  beginning to fail her was making plans for her children’s education.

 The judge noted that Shian’s illness in 2015 had led her to think carefully about Zachary and Aman’s schooling,  that she had been contemplating their future, even as her own future narrowed. She was 43 years old with a terminal diagnosis and two little boys and a whole life still ahead of her that she was going to fight like hell to protect for as long as she could with whatever she had left.

 Zachary was eight.  He was at the age where children are beginning to have opinions, starting to become themselves in ways that are visible and surprising and wonderful. He had his whole life to become whoever he was going to be. Aman was four. He was at the age of questions and wonder and running everywhere and not walking anywhere and the particular fierce love that fouryear-olds have for the people who are theirs.

 They are buried in memory now by everyone who knew them and by everyone who has heard their names since. They should be teenagers and a young man today. They should be arguing and laughing and driving their mother to distraction in all the ordinary ways. They should exist. Arthur Simpson Kent is in prison. He will be there until he dies.

 The whole life order handed down by Mr. Justice Singh in October 2016 was upheld on appeal in June 2017 and stands. There is no mechanism by which he will be released short of extraordinary humanitarian circumstances. He is serving the only sentence the law considers proportionate for what he did. The rest of his natural life behind a door he cannot open.

 The Metropolitan Police’s referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission resulted in an investigation into the handling of the initial missing person’s  report. The IPCC examined the decisions made on the 16th of December when officers visited the house and accepted Simpson Kent’s story about Cambridge. The full findings of that investigation and  any disciplinary consequences that followed are not fully in the public domain, but the referral itself acknowledged that there were potential issues in how the case was

handled. Cheyenne’s family, her sisters, her aunts, the people who loved her, have spoken publicly about missing her, about wanting answers,  about the grief of knowing that the police came to the house and left. They have had to live with that knowledge alongside every other dimension of what they lost and the broader conversation that Cyan Blake’s case belongs to  about domestic homicide about the danger of leaving about what happens when controlling men are not identified and stopped before they become killers

continues. Her name is invoked in it. It should be. There is a line from the judge’s sentencing remarks that I have not been able to stop thinking about since I first read it. Mr. Justice Singh,  describing the night of the 13th of December, 2015, noted that Simpson Kent had told the forensic psychiatrist that he would not have been able to kill his sons if they had not been asleep. That neither child woke up.

He had planned it. He had thought about it in enough detail to know that a conscious alert child  would have made it harder. He had waited. And while he stood in that room with a knife, having just killed three members of his own family, he told the psychiatrist that he had planned to kill himself, too.

 He stood there and he did not do it. He chose to live. He chose to board a flight to Ghana.  He chose to send text messages from Shian’s phone pretending she was alive. He chose at every single point after those murders to save himself. The only people in that house who did not get to choose anything were Shiion, Zachary, and Aman.

 This is not a story about a man who lost control. This is a story about a man who believed that his control over that family was so absolute, so non-negotiable, so fundamental to his sense of himself that when it ended, he ended them. Those are not the same thing. One suggests a moment of overwhelming emotion. The other suggests something much colder, much more considered, much more deliberately chosen.

 She and Blake was trying to leave a man who could not accept being left. She was a woman already facing death who was trying to give her children something better before the disease took away her ability to do so. She deserved to be believed when she showed signs of wanting out. She deserved a faster response from every institution that touched her life in those final months.

 She deserved to be a sign language teacher and a mother and a woman who got to find out what it felt like to live free of that house. She deserved so much more than what she got. If this story moved you, and I know it did, please like this video and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe to Vanished Women and Children if you have not already.

 And drop a comment below telling me where in the world you are watching from and what you think should happen when family members warn police that something is wrong and the police walk away.  Let me know your thoughts. Shian Samantha Blake, born the 14th of September, 1972. Murdered the 14th or 15th of December, 2015. Zachary Blake Kent, 8 years old.

Almond Blake Kent, 4 years old. Say their names. Until next time, stay safe. And if you or someone you know is in a situation that feels unsafe, please reach out to someone. The number for the National Domestic Abuse Helpline in the UK is 08082000247.  Available around the clock, free and confidential.

 In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1800799 safe. You do not have to wait until it gets worse.