Tony Martin (farmer)

Anthony Edward "Tony" Martin (born c. 1944) is a farmer from Norfolk, England, who shot a burglar dead in his home in August 1999. Martin was convicted of murder, later reduced to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility, and served three years in prison, having been denied parole. He has since lived at a secret address.

In 1999 Tony Martin, a bachelor, was living alone at his farmhouse in Emneth Hungate, Norfolk, nicknamed Bleak House, which he inherited at age 35 from his uncle. He claimed to have been burgled a total of ten times, losing £6,000 worth of furniture. Police sources say they are not sure that all the incidents took place. Martin also complained about police inaction over the burglaries and claimed that multiple items and furniture were stolen such as dinnerware and a grandfather clock. Martin had equipped himself with an illegally held pump-action Winchester Model 1300 12 boreshotgun which he claimed to have found. Martin had his shotgun certificate revoked in 1994 after he found a man for apples in his orchard and shot a hole in the back of his vehicle. Pump-action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than two are illegal to hold on a shotgun certificate however, and can only be held with a firearms certificate.

On the night of 20 August 1999, two burglars – Brendon Fearon, 29, and Fred Barras, 16 – broke into Martin's house. Shooting downwards in the dark, with his shotgun, loaded with birdshot, Martin shot three times towards the intruders (once when they were in the stairwell and twice more when they were trying to flee through the window of an adjacent ground floor room). Barras was hit in the back and both sustained gunshot injuries to their legs. Both escaped through the window but Barras died at the scene. Martin claimed that he opened fire after being woken when the intruders smashed a window. The prosecution accused him of lying in wait for the burglars and opening fire without warning from close range, in retribution for previous break-ins at his home.

On 10 January 2000, Fearon and Darren Bark, 33 (who had acted as the getaway driver), both from Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, admitted to conspiring to burgle Martin's farmhouse. Fearon was sentenced to 36 months in prison, and Bark to 30 months (with an additional 12 months arising from previous offences). Fearon was released on 10 August 2001. Fred Barras, the dead youth, had accumulated a lengthy criminal record, having been arrested 29 times by the time of his death at the age of 16, and had been sentenced to two months in a young offenders' institution for assaulting a policeman, theft and being drunk and disorderly. On the night he was killed, the teenager had just been released on bail after being accused of stealing garden furniture. Barras' grandmother, Mary Dolan, stated: "It's not fair that the farmer has got all the money and he is the one that took Fred away."

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