Inside the house of depravity: Two giant TVs, a snooker room but the children were barely fed by Mick Philpott whose sordid lifestyle beggars belief

Of the six children pulled dead or dying from the Philpott family home in the early hours of the morning of May 11, 2012, only ten-year-old Jade was wearing pyjamas.
Jack and Jesse, eight and six, were in their underwear while Duwayne, 13, was in his jeans, as was John, nine.
As for the youngest, Jayden, just five, he was wearing his full school uniform
It wasn’t that they got dressed when the fire broke out. None had time for that. It was just that their parents never could be bothered to get them changed when they put them to bed.
Because, for all their parents’ flannel about the happy family life that unfolded behind the door of 18 Victory Road, the reality was grotesquely different.
Sure, Philpott would jump into the driver’s seat of the family’s minibus to ferry the children to school every morning.

But as far as his involvement with the kids went, that was pretty much that.
Despite repeatedly claiming that the three-bedroom council semi was too small for his growing brood, Philpott had selfishly extended the ground floor space to accommodate a full-sized snooker table — leaving the children to squeeze into three bedrooms upstairs.
The house was kitted out with two 50in flat-screen TVs, one in the conservatory and the other in the lounge.
The Philpotts also enjoyed a full Sky TV package and had PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS  games consoles.
While ‘Shameless Mick’, a man who washed only once a month, lounged on the settee, it was left to his 32-year-old wife Mairead and mistress Lisa Willis, 29, to cook, clean and wait on him hand and foot. If they worked — they did occasional cleaning jobs — their wages went straight into his bank account, along with £60,000 a year in benefits.
Whenever he demanded it, the women were expected to satisfy his sexual demands — either with himself or, in the case of Mairead, with other men, too.
While the two women busied themselves with their domestic duties, the children would be fighting each other for their father’s attention as he sat glued to the box.
One source who was a regular visitor to the house in recent years said that, while the family had a large dining table to accommodate all the children, their diet left much to be desired.
‘The children would be given a quarter of a bun each with a bit of hot dog or burger in it, served with chips,’ he said.
‘There never seemed to be enough food to go around. Little Jayden just lived on chips.’
Understanding what makes a man as thoroughly unpleasant as Mick Philpott tick is no easy task but, giving evidence in court, he did his best to explain.
‘My first priority is my mother, then my children, and then my wife after that,’ the 56-year-old said.
There is, of course, one glaring omission. Because Mick Philpott’s real priority throughout his life has always been himself.
'Everyone else was merely tolerated so long as they served his purpose and did as they were told.

Even that deadly blaze was all about Philpott. He was meant to have emerged from that night as the hero, having single-handedly saved the children from the fire.
When it went wrong, it might be imagined that unbearable guilt and grief would make him do the right thing for once in his life. Did it hell.
Instead, he told lie after lie after lie. He even tried to use the tragedy to line his own pockets.
Having encouraged the local community to start a collection to pay for the six funerals, he demanded that any money left over should be given to him in Argos vouchers.
As for the mountain of teddy-bears left by well-wishers outside the family’s charred house in Derby, he pushed for them to be auctioned off.
Shameless, indeed.
Philpott was born into a sprawling Roman Catholic family, where multiple marriages and large numbers of offspring were the norm.
His mother Margaret, who recently turned 86, and who is known as Peggy, was the eldest of seven. Raised in Ireland, her family moved to Manchester in the Forties.

After a failed first marriage which ended with her two children being placed into care, Peggy moved to Derby, where she struck up a relationship with John Philpott, a divorced bus conductor.
They had their first child, John, in 1953. Philpott was born four years later, the fourth of eight in total, a boy with a sharp temper and fast fists.
When he joined the Army in 1975 aged 18, it was hoped his aggression might be properly channelled.
Not that his mother was unduly worried. In her eyes, the boy could do no wrong.
A relative explains: ‘Peggy will not have a word said against him, yet he can behave appallingly towards her. I remember one incident when he was home on leave from the Army.
‘Peggy had ironed a shirt for him and he screwed it up and told her: “F****** do that again, and do it properly.” The bottom line is that Mick has always been a bully.’
Just what a bully would soon become terrifyingly clear. A few weeks before signing up for the Army, Philpott had begun a relationship with 15-year-old Kim Hill. Desperate to be with her, he later went absent without leave. The incident brought his military career to an end after just 11 months.
When she tried to finish the relationship, an enraged Philpott sneaked into her home and stabbed her 27 times.
He would subsequently be convicted of attempted murder and GBH, and locked up for seven years.
Tragically, the spell in jail — a mere three years as it turned out — would do little to change Philpott. While behind bars, his eldest brother came to visit, bringing with him his girlfriend, Pam Lomax. Philpott took a shine to her and, following his release, the couple married in May 1986.
Miss Lomax, who was five years younger than her husband, was already pregnant with their first child, David, now 26. They went on to have another son, Richard, 25, and a daughter, Michaela, 22.

The marriage lasted almost a decade but ended abruptly in 1995 when the then Mrs Philpott discovered her husband having sex in the marital home with a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Heather Kehoe.
The wife’s anger was tempered by relief: at last she had a way of ending what had become a typically abusive Philpott relationship.
That he targeted someone young and vulnerable to be his new lover was no coincidence — this was  just a key element of Philpott’s  grooming technique.
The unlikely couple met at a lake where Philpott, then 36, went fishing. Miss Kehoe was just 14 and hung out there with her friends. Within a year, Philpott had taken her virginity.
Her parents were dismayed by the relationship. Not that Philpott cared.
A few weeks after his girlfriend’s 16th birthday, he encouraged her to elope with him to Derby. Within months, Miss Kehoe was pregnant with the first of their two sons, Mikey and Aiden (the boys are now 15 and 14).
The arrival of the children bumped them up the council’s housing list and the family was handed the three-bed council house in Victory Road that Philpott would subsequently set ablaze.
Even then, Philpott had no intention of paying his own way. Having emptied Miss Kehoe’s childhood savings account of £1,500, he then harvested all the money she made from a full-time airport cleaning job, forcing her to go back to work a month after the birth of each child.

Philpott would joke that he wanted enough children for a football team. But when Miss Kehoe made it clear that she had no intention of bearing them for him, the relationship began to sour.
On one occasion Miss Kehoe would tell police how she considered leaving as she was homesick.
Philpott pinned her to the ground and held a knife to her throat. He warned her that the knife attack on his previous girlfriend had been carefully planned. ‘Mick was leaving me in no doubt that he would do the same to me,’ she told detectives.
The court heard the relationship ended in 2000 when Miss Kehoe fled the house after being subjected to a humiliating attack by Philpott.
As she was trying to get her son Mikey ready for bed, Philpott ordered her to put the boy down. She refused, replying: ‘He’s my son, too.’ At that, Philpott ordered the youngster to punch his mother in the face and to kick her.
Struggling to contain her emotion, Miss Kehoe told the court that her son, aged just two or three, carried out his father’s orders.
Philpott would be marked by what happened next. He wanted custody of the boys, but was never going to get it.
On December 23, 2002, the family court agreed the boys should stay with their mother.
Not getting his own way infuriated Philpott. From then on, straight after Christmas dinner each year, he would take down the decorations and ceremonially destroy the Christmas tree to mark the fact that he did not have two of his children with him.
Philpott was single and childless again. But not for long. Within a year, he had met and moved Mairead Duffy into Victory Road.
She was 19 and had a chaotic past. Born in Ireland, she came from a traveller background. She was abused as a child, forced out of school by bullies and raped in her teenage years.
She then fell into an abusive relationship during which her boyfriend shaved her hair off to stop her going out.
When she became pregnant at 16 with her first child, Duwayne, the father left her.

She was, she admitted, at ‘rock  bottom’ when she met Philpott, and jumped at the chance to move in with him (despite the fact that he’d had  a brief relationship with her mother, with whom he played darts).
‘He was my guardian angel,’ Mrs Philpott told the court. ‘He loved me and cared for me and made me feel safe.’
As was his way, within months of the relationship starting Philpott’s new lover was pregnant.
Mairead gave birth to their first child Jade in August 2001, followed by John in October 2002. They would go on to have three more children together.
While they were by then engaged, there was nothing conventional about their living arrangements because  Philpott had introduced a second woman, Lisa Willis, into the household.
Her background sounds depressingly familiar. At the age of 12, her mother had died, leaving her an orphan and in the care of her elder sister.
At 16, she gave birth to a neighbour’s baby (she and Philpott would have four more of their own). The elder sister had babysat for Philpott and when they all bumped into one another in the street in Derby, he invited Miss Willis, then 16, to come to his 2001 New Year’s Eve party.
She went along, Philpott made his move and they kissed. Soon after, Miss Willis moved in, bringing with her Jordan, her young son.
Within weeks, their relationship had become sexual, the two women agreeing to take it in turns to share Philpott’s bed.
Initially, these sex sessions took place in the house itself and then in a shabby £500 caravan that he placed on the driveway of the property.
Sources said the women were expected to have sex with Philpott virtually every day, and were ‘on their backs’ even when pregnant.
What the children made, or saw, of these goings-on, one can only imagine.

Although the trio denied in court that they had sex with each other as a threesome, Philpott boasted they did.
A family friend told the Mail: ‘They were absolutely brazen about their sex life. Mick would call me up and say things like: “I’ve just had a lovely threesome with the two girls.”
Far from being ashamed about his behaviour as he claimed in court, he used to brag about what he got up to in bed with them.’
Another source who was close to the Philpotts claimed: ‘It was all done in the caravan, sometimes when the children were at school but sometimes after they had gone to bed, meaning no adults were in the house to look after them. It was absolutely shocking.’
Philpott and his wife were also into dogging — going to car parks late at night to have sex with strangers.
While she had sex with random men, Philpott either watched or joined in.
During one of these encounters, Mrs Philpott became pregnant. When she told her husband what had happened, he was unsympathetic.
‘He told me to sort it, deal with it,’ she said. ‘I thought he meant have an abortion, so I did.’
But it did not stop the couple inviting Philpott’s best friend and co-accused Paul Mosley to take part in sex sessions at home, while the children slept upstairs. On the night of the fire itself, Mosley had sex with Mrs Philpott on the snooker table.
So why did Mairead put up with this? Her family say she was terrified of him, and that he isolated her and the children from those who cared about them.

dailymail.co.uk