News
The heir to a pie company fortune has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering his best friend on Christmas Eve in the house they shared.
Dylan Thomas stabbed William Bush, 23, on 24 December 2023, a total of 37 times with a large kitchen knife and a flick knife.
Thomas, 24, who admitted manslaughter but denied murder, had looked up details of the anatomy of the neck in the hours before the attack in Llandaff, Cardiff.
Thomas is the grandson of Sir Stanley Thomas, who made his fortune with his brother, Peter, with the south Wales-based family firm Peter’s Pies.
Thomas will serve a minimum term of 19 years before he eligible to be considered for release.
It took jurors three hours to find him guilty of murder in November.
Judge Karen Steyn described the murder as a “sustained and ferocious knife attack” on “a young man who had been a firm and loyal friend”.
“He was a compassionate, loving, witty and vibrant young man,” she said.
“He had a bright future ahead of him.”
She said Mr Bush was “senselessly murdered” depriving him of “many, many decades of a happy and fulfilling life”.
Speaking in court on Friday, Mr Bush’s sister Catrin said her brother’s life was taken “in the most barbaric and cruel way”.
“Will was such a loyal, funny and caring person, he lit up every room he walked into with his cheeky grin,” she said.
“My family have been left with a massive hole which will ever be filled.”
John Bush, William’s father, added their lives had been changed in “a profound and fundamental way”.
“Christmas will not be a time of celebration for our family for many years,” he said.
Elle Jeffreys, William’s girlfriend, told the court she had “lost a future we had both planned and prepared for”.
She said he was a big supporter of Arsenal football club and was fit and active, playing golf for his home county of Powys and running the Cardiff Half Marathon with her in 2023.
“Will was the love of my life and meant everything to me,” she said.
“He would light up any room he walked in to.
“Life will never be the same without Will.”
During the trial, the prosecution told Cardiff Crown Court that Thomas was in a “downward spiral” but in control of his actions at the time of the killing.
He had been arrested weeks earlier for trying to scale the fence at Buckingham Palace and had been released on police bail.
On the morning of the attack, Thomas was driven to Llandaff by his grandmother, Sharon Burton, who described him as becoming “more and more agitated” during the journey.
When she parked outside the property, Thomas went in, got the knives, went to Mr Bush’s bedroom and stabbed him repeatedly.
The prosecution said passers-by “heard screams of horror” from the house.
Thomas banged on his grandmother’s car window and she found Mr Bush on the patio outside.
Thomas called 999 for an ambulance after the attack, claiming his friend had “gone mental” and stabbed him.
But the prosecution told the trial it was “a planned attack” by Thomas on Mr Bush and he “deliberately armed himself with knives and attacked him from behind”.
The court was given expert opinion that Thomas had been psychotic for months before the killing.
Jurors heard that he told police officers he was Jesus after his arrest for the killing and offered one police officer a “job with God”.
Dylan Thomas has been a patient at Ashworth High Secure Hospital, Liverpool, since March 2024 where he is being treated for schizophrenia and psychosis.
The Thomas family company was launched as Thomas Pies in the 1950s, selling sausage rolls, pies and pasties around the south Wales valleys.
In the 1970s it became Peter’s Pies, and is now known as Peter’s Food, based in Bedwas in Caerphilly county.
The late Stan Thomas passed on the company to his sons Stan junior – Dylan Thomas’s grandfather – and Peter, the former chairman of Cardiff RFC rugby club, who died in 2023. They sold the company in 1988.
