Killer should 'stay behind bars forever'

Lying bleeding in the doorway, Jill Burkitt was helpless as her neighbour gunned down her mother, father and brother.

Now, almost 36 years later, she says she hopes killer Harry Street will never again be released from secure detention, having been previously let out in the 1990s after serving just 15 years for taking five lives.

Incredibly, Street, now aged 70, was brought back before the courts and detained once again after amassing a collection of pistols and even a home-made bomb at his home in Birmingham, just a few miles away from the West Bromwich road where in 1978 he gunned down the Burkitt family before driving to Warwickshire and slaughtering a married couple who ran a filling station.

Miss Burkitt, aged 53, was just a teenager at the time of the attack by mentally ill Street, who was known at the time as Barry Williams.

Her family simply had the misfortune to live next door to Williams.

She said brother Philip had been outside on the drive with their father, George on October 26, 1978 in Andrew Road on West Bromwich's Bustleholme Mill estate. Jill and her mother Iris were inside. Miss Burkitt said: "Suddenly my brother burst in clutching his arm. He was shocked and wide-eyed as he told us that Williams had shot him and my dad

"Williams came through the back door, shooting me in the back as I tried to go outside. I was lying bleeding in the doorway. I could hear my mother gasping for breath as she must have been shot too. As I lay there, more shots echoed in the darkness and my brother came crashing through, his body resting motionless beside me." Miss Burkitt had been shot up to eight times in the back. Judy Chambers – another neighbour – was also seriously wounded. Williams fled in his Ford Capri, spraying bullets and throwing a makeshift bomb, which did not explode, as he left. Hours later he shot dead convenience store owners Michel Di Maria, aged 58, and 53-year-old wife Lisa, at their convenience store in Nuneaton before being cornered and arrested in Bakewell, Derbyshire, after crashing his car into a police vehicle following a 100mph chase. He pleaded guilty to five charges of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was ordered to be detained indefinitely.

He spent time in the Broadmoor secure hospital and was judged safe to release in July 1993. Williams changed his name to Harry Street, was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for his schizophrenia, met wife-to-be Beverley and returned to the West Midlands. He was living in Hazelville Road, Hall Green when he began harassing his neighbours there.

When police arrested him, they found a cache of six guns, dozens of home-made bullets and a makeshift bomb.

Miss Burkitt said: "I've had nightmares about the man coming back to get me. Why was he allowed out to plan an identical atrocity? Now a judge has said he will never get out again. I hope and pray that is true this time." Street admitted possessing the improvised explosive device as his trial was due to begin and had previously pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing a prohibited firearm and a count of putting a neighbour in fear of violence between 2009 and 2013. The pensioner is at high-security Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside.