The millionaire, the mansion, and the moral tragedy

A true story.
Chris Foster had always had a fascination with fire. After seeing coverage of an oil rig disaster in which the inferno blazed for days, he invented an insulating material for valves and staked everything on a demonstration. When the flames died down, the valves were intact. He was made.

Over the next few years business boomed and the money rolled in. A £1 million manor in the rolling English countryside, blingy personalised cars, holidays in Mauritius, private school for his beloved daughter, membership of costly hunting and shooting clubs. His transformation from ordinary lad to country squire was complete.

Several years on, his position was unravelling fast. Unpaid taxes backlogged, securitized loans, mounting debts. He loses control of his company. Meanwhile, he's still compulsively spending.
He tells no-one. His wife, his daughter, his own mother unaware.

Fast forward - August 2008. Chris Foster spends time after a barbeque lovingly flicking through family photo albums in his luxury kitchen. His loved ones are already tucked up in bed. He calmly pumps oil into the basement, takes his custom-made engraved rifle and, caught on his own CCTV cameras, paces around his estate. Dispatches his dogs and his daughter's horses with single point-blank shots to the head. He does the same to his slumbering wife, his daughter. Then he lies down entwined with his spouse on the marital bed and waits for the smoke to overcome him. The bailiffs were due barely a few hours later to repossess his property. They got nothing.

His sobbing mother, a stout silver-haired lady, tries to make sense of it all. I think he did it because he loved them, she suggests. He hadn't wanted to drag them down in the fallout, lose the lives of luxury, disappoint his daughter who lived for her horses. But I still love him. You don't stop loving your child just because they do something...awful.

(I won't pretend it's word for word, I don't have the transcript. But you get the meaning).

Chris Foster's story is an extreme case of career, money, power and ego trumping everything else: most tragically, family. Without one, the other became worthless to him. And he forgot that his wife and daughter weren't possessions, on a par with the cars, the pets, the mansion.

MORAL(S) OF THE STORY:
1) What lasting value has career, ego, money and power if we sacrifice those we love in the process? This example is the most extreme (and perverse), but we can still apply what we can learn from it to our everyday lives...

2) We don't 'OWN' our children, our families. We cannot control them, dictate their lives in the same way we might lay down performance targets at work. As put by the lebanese writer and philosopher Khalid Gibran: "Our children are not our children...they are the Sons and Daughters of Life's longing for itself...we are the bows, from which our children, like arrows, are sent forth..."

P.S. Kirstie Foster was only 15...

(acknowledgements to Channel 4's programme 'The Millionaire and the Murder Mansion')