I cite this article to validate a point. The victim was a rugby player, therefore physically conditioned, and a karate champ, therefore defensively competent. Yet, two police (well, one former) are said to have killed this woman and her entire family with a single 4ft pole.

Two policemen and lesbian lover held over
deaths

By Andrew Buncombe

5 July 2000

A former policewoman and her police sergeant husband were
arrested yesterday over the murder of the woman’s lesbian lover, her
two children and their grandmother.

The woman’s brother-in-law ? also a serving police officer ? was
arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice.

Alison Lewis, 33 and her estranged husband Sgt Steve Lewis 38,
were arrested early yesterday morning in a series of co-ordinated
raids by South Wales Police. They and Sgt Lewis’s 38-year-old
brother, Inspector Stuart Lewis, were being questioned last night at
separate police stations.

The arrests were made by detectives investigating the murder last
year of Mandy Power, her disabled 80-year-old mother and her two
daughters. Mrs Power, 34, her daughters Katie, 10, and Emily, eight,
and their grandmother Doris Dawson, 80, were beaten to death with a
4ft metal pole at their home in the village of Clydach, near Swansea on
27 June last year.

Whoever murdered the family had also tried to cover their tracks by
setting fire to the house. Firemen who discovered the bodies ? Mrs
Power lying semi-naked at the top of the stairs, having been sexually
assaulted, her daughters near by and Mrs Dawson still in her bed.

Mrs Power, a divorcee, was having an affair with Mrs Lewis, a keen
women’s rugby player and former British karate champion. Mrs Power
had a number of other partners of both sexes. She met Mrs Lewis
through their involvement in women’s rugby, which is said to have a
sizeable lesbian following.

The day after the bodies were discovered, Mrs Lewis threw herself
from a window but suffered only minor injuries. She had left the South
Wales Police three years earlier, after having twin daughters with her
husband. Sgt Lewis had previously been questioned about the killings
but was released without charge and given compassionate leave.

He took the couple’s daughters, now aged four, to stay with family in
Germany for three weeks but was afterwards allowed to return to his
police work.

Mrs Lewis moved out of the family home to live with her parents in
Pontypridd. Divorce proceedings were started and she was given
custody of the twins earlier this year. She moved out of her parents’
home four months ago to live at a house 100 yards away. It was there
that police arrived yesterday morning.

A neighbour, David Edge, 37, said: “I was woken up by the sound of
police cars screeching down the road. It was like something out of
The Bill.They cordoned off the streets and took away a young woman
who lived in the house with her daughters.”

Meanwhile 50 miles away there were similar scenes at Mrs Lewis’s
former marital home in Pontardawe, where Sgt Lewis still lives.
Michelle Morgan, a neighbour said: “The police arrived at dawn and if
you ask me they are taking the place apart. There were six police
vehicles outside the house and some items have been loaded into a
police van.” Mrs Power’s family and her former husband, Mike, were
told of the three arrests yesterday.

A family spokesman said: “It is upsetting because it has brought it all
back to us. We are glad they’ve made an arrest”

Detective Superintendent Martyn Lloyd-Evans of South Wales Police
urged anyone with information about the murders to come forward.