July 29, 2024, dawned warm and overcast, an otherwise ordinary day at the start of the long summer holidays.

Shortly before 10am, a group of 26 young girls and their parents gathered outside The Hart Space in Southport, Merseyside. Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, were among those signed up to take part in a Taylor Swift dance, yoga and bracelet-making workshop for girls aged six to 11.

‘Alice was very excited that morning,’ recalled the youngster’s mother, Alexandra. ‘In the car on the way, she put her favourite music on and we chatted about the day ahead. When we arrived, Alice was a little shy. She asked me to stay with her but then she saw a teacher that she knew and she ran off.

‘As Alice’s mum, I really wish that I had stayed that day.’

The room, a first-floor studio located on an industrial estate, filled with excited chatter and laughter as the girls kicked off their shoes and sat down in a circle with teachers Leanne Lucas and Heidi Liddle, ready to start their class.

Four-and-a-half miles away another, very different, morning was unfolding. In a small semi-detached house on a quiet cul-de-sac in the neighbouring village of Banks, Axel Rudakubana was already awake and planning to attack the girls.

Little has been known about his movements that morning, those ominous hours before 11.45am when he arrived at The Hart Space armed with a 20cm kitchen knife and began mercilessly stabbing those defenceless little girls.

Menacing CCTV footage of the 17-year-old pacing back and forth at a bus stop, and a subsequent video clip taken inside a taxi, in which his dead eyes glare out from behind a green hoodie and surgical mask, has been widely viewed.

CCTV shows Axel Rudakubana walking to a bus stop on the morning of the attack

He then returned to his home where he paced back and forth while waiting for a taxi

Video from inside the taxi shows Rudakubana wearing a face mask with the hood of his jumper tightly pulled over his head

Dashcam footage shows the killer entering the Hart Space centre in Southport where the dance class was taking place

But chilling new evidence emerged this week about his movements – and the disturbing behaviour of other family members – inside the Rudakubana home. Not only did the murderer’s parents, Alphonse, 50, and Laetitia, 53, and his elder brother, Dion, now 21, who had returned home from university just three days previously, know he had left the house – something he hadn’t done alone in more than two years – but they made no attempt to stop him.

This was despite the fact that the last time Rudakubana had left the family home alone, in March 2022, he was found on a bus with a knife in his backpack and a plan ‘to stab someone’.

This was despite the fact that, just minutes after her younger son walked out of the door, Laetitia found empty packaging for a chef’s knife hidden in the washing machine.

This was despite the fact that, while waiting in the hallway that morning to go out with his friends, Dion spotted another empty knife box by the door of the living room.

This was despite the fact that, a week previously, Alphonse told the Southport Inquiry, he had stopped his son from leaving the house because he feared it was ‘obvious’ he was going to hurt others. Instead of doing something about it, instead of calling the police – or, indeed, calling their son, who they knew had his mobile phone with him – Alphonse and Laetitia did nothing.

Astonishingly, Alphonse admitted to the inquiry that he was ‘busy doing other things’, rather than worrying about where his reclusive, violent son, whom he knew had been stockpiling lethal weapons in the living room for months, had gone.

His mind on the day ahead, he planned to go to Kwik Fit to get a tyre changed on the family car. Laetitia, who was preparing for a block of night shifts at work, went back to bed. They told their eldest son, who hadn’t spoken to his sibling since the previous summer, that they suspected Rudakubana had ‘gone for a walk’.

Although he barely knew his brother any more, Dion thought this very unlikely.

The last time Rudakubana had left the family home alone, in March 2022, he was found on a bus with a knife in his backpack and a plan ‘to stab someone’

Looking back on that awful morning, Dion says his concerns were allayed by his parents’ ‘calm’ response to Rudakubana’s departure. ‘I got a bit nervous; initially I was quite surprised,’ he told the inquiry this week

After all, this was a teenager who had no friends or any social contact, having been expelled from one school and dropped out of two others, who sometimes refused food and went months without washing.

So poor was his personal hygiene that his father had to ‘reward’ him for showering, giving him £40 for ‘good behaviour’, money he spent on weapons.

His only hobbies were playing the computer game Fortnite and watching videos – now known to include sadistic content about torture and genocide – on YouTube. This was seemingly not the sort of young man who would simply decide, out of the blue, to ‘go for a walk’.

Looking back on that awful morning, Dion says his concerns were allayed by his parents’ ‘calm’ response to Rudakubana’s departure. ‘I got a bit nervous; initially I was quite surprised,’ he told the inquiry this week.

‘My mum got up and the idea that he was going out on a walk came about. My parents seemed very sure about this.’

As we all now sadly know, this was not – nor was it ever – Rudakubana’s plan.

Having read about the Taylor Swift workshop online and – just six minutes before leaving the house – watched a barbaric video of a bishop being stabbed during a sermon in Sydney, Australia, in April 2024, he had nothing but murder on his mind.

Though there is no suggestion any of his family could have known about the evil rampage he would go on to commit, this week’s revelations have shown clear and culpable failings on the part of his parents, for their blind inaction in the face of very obvious warning signs. ‘I think the love I had for him overrode good judgment,’ Alphonse admitted.

‘Our judgment was poor, it was wrong, and it was influenced by the fact that he’s our son.

‘I am desperately sorry… for not calling the police at this point.’

Laetitia told the inquiry the family were feeling ‘distressed’ and ‘broken’, having endured their son’s volatile behaviour behind closed doors for many years.

‘I feel like I’ve been naive, not connecting the dots,’ she said. ‘But I honestly never thought he was going to go out to do bad things. I’m sorry for being naive.’

Both parents, who appeared remotely to conceal their appearance and current location, broke down in tears while giving evidence. But the time for apologies, no matter how heartfelt, has long since passed.

Given what we know now, it is little wonder Nicholas Bowen KC, representing the families of Bebe, Alice and Elsie, told Alphonse they had ‘complete disdain’ for his ‘excuses’ about his family’s repeated failures to act. Elsie’s parents, Jenni and David Stancombe, later said in a poignant statement: ‘They [Alphonse and Laetitia] failed not only as parents but as members of our society.’

Much of the detail about the morning of July 29, 2024, comes from Dion, a gifted university student who, until the slaughter forced his entire family into hiding, had a bright and promising future ahead of him.

Dion, who has a neuromuscular condition, began using an electric wheelchair at the age of 12, and says the brothers were once close, but that ‘tension’ set in as he started getting more attention.

In 2016, Dion moved school, to Range High in nearby Formby, because it was better suited to pupils with additional needs. His brother followed when he started secondary, something the younger boy ‘resented’ as it meant leaving his friends. After this, he says, Rudakubana’s mood began to deteriorate; he became ‘despondent’ and would have frequent ‘violent outbursts’. Dion became ‘increasingly wary’ of his brother, avoiding contact with him and covering his ears when conversations came up regarding his mental health.

Speaking to the Daily Mail this week, a friend who was close to Dion at school says he ‘never spoke’ about his brother.

‘The dichotomy between the two siblings could not be more apparent,’ the friend says.

‘Dion always had a positive outlook on life despite his disability… he didn’t feel sorry for himself.

‘He was very intelligent and did very well at school. He was top set in everything.’

The friend says he felt for Dion when, in March 2020, the pair had their GCSEs cancelled because of the first Covid-19 lockdown.

With his brother – who had been expelled in October 2019 and later returned to Range to attack a former classmate with a hockey stick – becoming ever more aggressive at home, it must have been a difficult time for Dion.

‘I can only presume that,’ the friend says. ‘You can only assume he had no idea what was coming.’

Having been driven home from university by his father on July 26, 2024, Dion was certainly unaware of the tense and fearful atmosphere that awaited him in Banks. He and Rudakubana hadn’t spoken in over a year; on their last interaction, Dion says, his sibling threw a bottle at him rather than saying goodbye.

He avoided his brother’s bedroom, as well as the family living room, which had also been taken over by Rudakubana and was cluttered with Amazon boxes (now known to contain a vast arsenal of dangerous weapons and weapon-making materials).

He insists he knew little of an incident on July 22, when his father had stopped his brother from getting into a taxi, suspecting he was en route to his old high school to carry out a violent attack.

That same day, while clearing Rudakubana’s bedroom, his parents found his secret cache of weapons, including the Tupperware box containing the poison ricin, a bow and arrows, and a sledgehammer.

Laetitia was so alarmed by what they uncovered that she had a panic attack. In an apparent bid to protect his elder son, Alphonse mentioned only that ‘something bad’ had happened, but kept the details vague.

He did, however, tell Dion that Rudakubana had warned him: ‘If you stop me again, there will be consequences.’

Messaging a friend on July 27, Dion quoted his father as saying: ‘Your brother is dangerous. He can kill you.’ He insists he believed the threat was only to himself and his parents; not the outside world. ‘The risk to us was always consistent and was dominant,’ Dion told the inquiry.

Though he didn’t speak to his brother that weekend, he says he heard Rudakubana ‘talking to himself a lot… [it] sounded like he was arguing’.

When he woke, between 10am and 10.30am, on July 29, his brother was already up.

As he made his way across the landing to take a shower, he saw Rudakubana come upstairs, walk into his room, turn around, close the door – and then leave the house around 11.10am. He didn’t utter a word to anyone.

On hearing the front door slam, Alphonse – who was in the bathroom assisting Dion – shouted to Laetitia to ‘alert her’. Crucially, he asked his wife where their son was going, and whether he was carrying anything.

This, it would seem, suggests a clear concern that Rudakubana had left the house with a weapon. He had, after all, a choice of many, which, as the inquiry heard, his parents had done nothing to secure or confiscate since finding them the previous week.

On hearing his son appeared to be empty-handed, and that he’d walked away from the house rather than calling a taxi, Alphonse continued helping Dion.

What none of them realised was that, after waiting a few minutes at a nearby bus stop, Rudakubana had called a taxi to The Hart Space – using the false name ‘Simon’ – and returned to wait for it outside the family home. Shortly after his brother left, Dion says his mum showed him empty packaging from a 20cm-long kitchen knife, which she had found in the washing machine.

Laetitia’s account differs, recounting that she saw some packaging sticking out of a plastic carrier bag they kept on the landing for rubbish.

She didn’t mention this in her first police interview, seemingly only recalling it later – after officials had found her fingerprint on that same packaging.

‘I just tidied it up, pushing it fully into the plastic bag,’ she claimed. ‘I don’t remember telling Dion that I saw it, or that it said “chef’s knife” on the package. I didn’t connect this packaging to thoughts of [Rudakubana] having a knife or causing harm to others.’

For his part, Alphonse insists he never saw the package and knew nothing about it.

But Dion – whose recollection of that morning seems lucid and precise – recalls ‘shared concern’ between himself and his parents when it was found. ‘I thought there was concern when knife packaging was found, shared between all of us,’ he told the inquiry.

There’s also the matter of packaging for a second knife, an open box which Dion noticed in the family living room as he was about to leave to meet friends.

He told the inquiry he didn’t tell his parents about it, as they already knew about the other one.

But by the time police searched the family home later that day, after the atrocity, that same box had somehow found its way into a rubbish bin outside.

Neither of Rudakubana’s parents were able to explain how this had happened.

Two hours passed from the moment he left the house; a long time, surely, for an out-of-character walk. Still, no calls were made to his mobile, nor to the police.

Then, around 1pm, Alphonse received a WhatsApp message from a member of his church, telling him something terrible had happened in Southport.

Tellingly, he responded straight away, saying he feared his son might be involved.

Dion was still in town when he ran into a friend who told him about the brutal attack. ‘I then started to worry it might be about my brother,’ he admits.

His initial concern was that Rudakubana had stabbed their parents. When he learned the victims were children, he was ‘devastated’ and ‘deeply saddened’.

As his sibling now rots in prison, where he will spend the next five decades, Dion is unable to return to his studies, use his real name – or resume any semblance of normality. ‘His life is forever affected… and it’s not Dion’s fault,’ his friend says. ‘I feel sorry for him.’

His parents, too, have left their home, cut ties with relatives and live in fear of retribution.

The Rudakubana family’s grief, however, is nothing compared to that of the families of those three little girls, nor the countless other youngsters, teachers, parents, relatives and bystanders who are profoundly changed by the trauma they witnessed that day.

The guilt Alphonse and Laetitia feel, and the part they may have played in allowing this evil to come to pass, is a burden they will bear for the rest of their lives.

In the eyes of the victims’ families, it is the very least they deserve.