For years, Sarah Barrass refused to tell her six children who their father was.

Eventually, she gave them an extraordinary explanation.

Their father, she claimed, had been a World War II veteran.

He was dead.

To the children, there was little reason to question their mother.

But the truth was not buried somewhere in the distant past.

Their father was alive.

He lived just down the road.

He regularly came to their house.

The children knew him.

They trusted him.

They called him Uncle Brandon.

Because Brandon Machin was Sarah Barrass’s half-brother.

And in 2019, the secret connecting the two adults would become part of an appalling case that ended with two of Sarah’s sons dead and attempts to kill other children in the family.

To people looking in from the outside, Sarah appeared to be a single mother raising six children in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.

Four of those children had additional needs, including ADHD, according to the source.

Managing the household was difficult.

Fortunately, Sarah appeared to have someone she could rely upon.

Her older half-brother Brandon lived nearby and frequently visited.

He helped with the children.

Professionals also came into the home because of the children’s needs.

And according to the account, those professionals did not question Sarah’s apparent affection for them.

But the history between Sarah and Brandon went back much further than anyone around the children understood.

Sarah was born in 1984 into an extremely unstable family.

She was one of five children who had different fathers, and the source describes a childhood without meaningful boundaries or discipline.

School attendance was inconsistent.

Adults regularly came and went from the home.

Drug use allegedly occurred around the children.

There were also allegations of sexual abuse.

Social services eventually removed Sarah and her siblings from the household.

But at around nine or ten years old, Sarah returned to her mother’s care.

Brandon, then approximately 13, was also living there.

The source portrays the young Brandon as aggressive and prone to fighting.

Sarah had previously been more reserved.

That began to change as the siblings became close.

Sarah started copying some of Brandon’s behavior.

She bullied other children.

She allegedly became violent toward younger siblings and animals.

The pair repeatedly moved between their mother’s home and the care system.

At 14, Sarah disclosed sexual abuse she said she had suffered years earlier.

According to the source, someone was subsequently imprisoned for offenses connected with that abuse.

But another disturbing development was taking place.

Sarah’s mother discovered love letters being sent to her teenage daughter.

Their content alarmed her enough to contact social services.

The matter apparently went no further.

Sarah remained in care until she was 18.

At 19, she became pregnant.

Over the following years, five more children followed.

Whenever anyone asked about their father, Sarah remained evasive.

She described him simply as an unreliable man with whom she occasionally had sex.

She did not identify him on the children’s birth certificates, according to the source.

Meanwhile, Brandon remained close.

He lived nearby.

He visited.

He helped Sarah care for the children.

Nobody looking at that arrangement necessarily had reason to imagine that the children’s helpful uncle occupied another role entirely.

By late 2018 and early 2019, however, serious problems were developing inside the family.

Support services visited the home repeatedly.

The two oldest boys, 14-year-old Blake and 13-year-old Tristan, were becoming increasingly difficult for Sarah to manage.

The source says concerns included bullying, stealing cars, plans to run away and problematic exposure to adult material.

Sarah reportedly told one support worker that she feared she was raising “monsters.”

The increased attention from police, schools and social services frightened her.

Sarah herself had spent much of her childhood in care.

Now she became convinced that authorities might remove her own children.

There had already been a warning involving Brandon.

Another of Sarah’s brothers, Martin, reportedly witnessed Brandon behaving aggressively toward the children.

He was disturbed enough to contact social services.

According to the source, no effective intervention followed.

Then authorities began asking a question Sarah had spent years avoiding.

Who was the children’s father?

Sarah’s answer to the children themselves had been almost fantastical.

Their father, she said, had been a World War II veteran who had died.

The story could not withstand serious scrutiny.

As questions intensified, Sarah’s behavior changed.

She became less cooperative with school and social services.

More disturbing were the messages she began sending.

In texts to Brandon, according to the source, Sarah wrote that she would rather take her own life and the children’s lives than allow them to enter care.

“I gave them life,” one message reportedly said.

“I can take it away.”

In another message to a friend, Sarah discussed possible solutions to her situation.

Care.

Psychiatric intervention.

Or killing the children and herself.

These were no longer simply expressions of a mother overwhelmed by six children.

They were explicit references to death.

Yet according to the account, the people who received or saw the messages did not alert authorities.

Sarah and Brandon then moved from words to action.

The source describes an initial attempt involving medication prescribed to the children for ADHD.

Four of the older children were given excessive quantities.

The intention, prosecutors later established, was to kill them.

It failed.

The children became ill but survived.

Sarah and Brandon then began looking for other methods.

The source says searches included strangulation, suffocation and drowning.

What happened next turned the Sheffield household into a murder scene.

Sarah entered Tristan’s bedroom.

Brandon went to Blake.

Tristan was strangled using a dressing-gown cord.

Blake was strangled by Brandon.

When Sarah and Brandon were uncertain whether the boys were dead, plastic bags were placed over their heads.

Blake and Tristan died.

But they were not intended to be the only victims.

According to the source, another of Sarah’s sons was then taken into the bathroom.

An attempt was made to drown him in the bathtub.

It failed.

Something then changed.

Sarah gathered her four surviving children into her bedroom and locked the door.

Brandon left the property and returned home.

Sarah called police.

But she did not initially tell officers what had happened.

Instead, she accused Brandon of trying to drown one of the children.

When police asked about Blake and Tristan, Sarah claimed the two boys were staying with friends.

They weren’t.

One of the younger children then did something small but crucial.

In front of officers, he moved the side of his hand across his throat.

Sarah noticed.

She told him not to tell lies.

The police did not ignore the gesture.

Sarah was taken into custody.

According to the source, she soon confessed.

She admitted involvement in the killings of Blake and Tristan.

She also admitted the earlier attempt to kill four of the children using medication.

Brandon was located at his home and arrested.

Only then did the secret at the center of the family begin to emerge publicly.

Brandon Machin was not simply the children’s uncle.

He was their father.

Sarah Barrass and her half-brother had been involved in a sexual relationship.

The relationship had reportedly begun when Sarah was still a teenager.

Sarah became pregnant at 19.

Six children followed.

The man she refused to identify on their birth certificates was the same man who remained close to the family and presented himself as their uncle.

The children’s father had never been a deceased World War II veteran.

He had been standing in front of them.

The case that initially appeared to involve a desperate mother and a violent uncle now contained another dimension.

Sarah and Brandon had a secret capable of devastating the family if exposed.

And questions from schools and social services about the children’s father were becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.

According to the prosecution case described in the source, preserving that secret became bound up with the plan to kill the children.

Blake and Tristan paid the ultimate price.

Their deaths devastated people far beyond the immediate household.

Both boys loved motorcycles, cars and engines.

When they were buried, the community turned out in extraordinary numbers.

According to the account, citing BBC reporting, roughly 300 motorcycles accompanied their funeral procession, along with two Lamborghinis.

It was a striking contrast.

The boys had died inside a family home where adults who should have protected them became their killers.

Outside that home, hundreds of strangers came to honor them.

The property itself remained boarded up afterward.

For neighbors, it became a physical reminder of what had happened behind its walls.

The house was eventually demolished in 2021.

A memorial park replaced it.

The surviving children faced a much longer recovery.

All four were taken into care.

The source describes them as severely traumatized.

For the child subjected to the attempted drowning, even something as ordinary as taking a bath reportedly became frightening.

In November 2019, Sarah Barrass and Brandon Machin pleaded guilty to murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to murder.

Both received life sentences.

Each was ordered to serve a minimum of 35 years.

But the prison terms alone cannot explain why this case remains so disturbing.

There were warning signs.

Sarah had openly written about killing herself and her children.

A family member had raised concerns about Brandon’s aggression.

Support services were already visiting the home.

Authorities were asking questions.

Sarah feared losing custody.

And behind everything was a family secret that had been hidden for years.

None of those factors made the murders inevitable.

But together they show that Blake and Tristan did not die in a household completely invisible to the outside world.

Professionals had been there.

Relatives had been concerned.

Messages had been sent.

Warnings existed.

Yet the danger inside the home was not understood until two children were already dead.

The most haunting part of the story may therefore not be the revelation that “Uncle Brandon” was actually the children’s father.

It is what happened when the adults decided that keeping control of their secret and their children mattered more than the children’s lives.

Blake was 14.

Tristan was 13.

They were old enough to begin pushing against the boundaries of their home.

Old enough for schools and authorities to start asking difficult questions.

Old enough for the truth about their family to become harder to contain.

And inside that Sheffield house, the two people who had created that secret reached a horrifying solution.

They tried to kill the children who might expose it.

Two survived an earlier poisoning attempt.

Another survived an attempted drowning.

Blake and Tristan did not.

For years, Sarah Barrass had told her children that their father was dead.

The truth was worse.

He was alive.

He lived nearby.

They knew him as their uncle.

And when the family’s hidden history began closing in around Sarah and Brandon, the two adults who should have protected those children became the greatest danger they faced.