An editor has opened up for the first time on his sister’s death in a mass shooting following the Plymouth spree killings.

Paul Winspear, who edits the Bishop’s Stortford Independent, has gone public on the “void” he has felt for 34 years since his sister Louise was shot dead at the age of just 22 in Wolverhampton by Charles Whitehouse.

Louise and bailiff Dennis Hull were shot in October 1987 after she was invited by a solicitor at the law firm where she worked, who was acting for Whitehouse’s wife in a divorce case, to attend his eviction from the marital home.

Whitehouse, 57, then shot them both before turning the gun on himself.

In an editorial for the Independent, Paul said news of the Plymouth shootings prompted the same “knot in the pit of my stomach” to return as when such incidents appear on the news.

Paul, pictured, wrote: “The loved ones of the Keyham victims have unwittingly and all too tragically been admitted to a club that no one wants to belong to and that no one can quit: its members have been bereaved by the actions of a mass gunman (it almost goes without saying that it was a man).”

Five people were shot in the Plymouth suburb of Keyahm by gunman Jake Davison before he turned the weapon on himself.

Among the victims were Lee Martyn – a cousin of Plymouth Live journalist Jess Morcom – and his daughter Sophie.

Paul was first told Louise had been shot while he was working in the newsroom of the Herts & Essex Observer.

Recalling his sister’s death, Paul added: “No one knows why he shot Louise. The inquest heard that his eyesight was failing and my theory is that he believed the female figure in the front of his wife’s solicitor’s car was his wife.

“The Plymouth shootings were all over in six minutes. I don’t know how long the Wolverhampton episode lasted. But there wasn’t enough time for Louise to be safe from harm. She made it to hospital, but nothing could be done there to save her.

“The days that followed are a blur in the fog of my appalling long-term memory.

“What I do remember is my mother’s cry that first night without Louise. Actually, it wasn’t a cry. It was a howl. I’ve never heard a human being utter a noise like it since.

“But I can imagine howls have been shattering the nights and days in Keyham, crying out for Sophie, Lee, Maxine, Stephen and Kate.”

Paul went on to recall the funeral being held in the “glare of media coverage” after Louise’s photo and the story of her death had been national front page news.

He added: “Throughout my lifelong career as a journalist, I have invited strangers to share with our readers the stories of their losses – through my colleagues’ reports or in their own words – but I have never, until now, shared my own. Plymouth – and that knot in my stomach – was the prompt.

“I have had to accept that I live with a void that – even 34 years on, and maybe because of other, various losses in my life – has a habit of swallowing me up without warning and then spitting me back out to resume that mundane task I was in the middle of.

“And just because that void is there, it does not mean that there is not room also for happiness, love and joy.”

Speaking to HTFP, Paul explained why the Plymouth shootings had prompted him to go public on his experience as a bereaved relative of a mass shooting victim.

He said: “It was very much an instinctive act to write something based on the visceral reaction I had to those initial news alerts, and it took me several sessions in my own time, alone in the office on a few evenings.

“Weirdly, it was the easiest thing to write in that it kind of flowed straight out of me – I suppose that’s the nature of spilling your emotional guts – and, at the same time, the hardest.

“I really wanted to offer some kind of hope to the bereaved ‘affected’ that life can go on, albeit with a void at the centre of your day-to-day life – and to that end that’s why I tagged the Plymouth MP Luke Pollard on Twitter.”