Teenager who executed his family planned gun attack at primary school

A teenager who wanted to be 'the most famous killer in history' shot dead his family then set out to carry out a gun attack at his old primary school.

Nicholas Prosper, 18, exploited a terrifying loophole in gun laws to buy a shotgun and 100 cartridges using a fake firearms licence he made himself.

His chilling mission to commit 'the biggest massacre in the 21st century' came just a day after he bought the gun. 

The school dropout launched his rampage on September 13 last year, blasting his mother, Juliana Falcon, 48, and siblings Kyle Prosper, 16, and Giselle Prosper, 13, in the head at their Luton home before setting off for the school intending to 'kill all'.

The gunman fantasised about shooting a classroom of 30 children aged four and five and their teachers, by bursting into the assembly at St Joseph's Catholic Primary School at 9am.

But he was 'prevented by chance and circumstance alone' after a passing police car stopped to investigate on seeing the killer standing by the roadside holding a bloodied fist aloft in a kind of salute.

Dressed in a yellow and black tracksuit reminiscent of Uma Thurman's trained assassin in the movie Kill Bill, Prosper was less than a mile from the school when he was spotted by two officers at 7.50am.

Just hours earlier, the same officers had stood guard at the scene where Prosper had shot dead his family at 5am, leaving their bodies face down in a pool of blood next to a book entitled How To Kill Your Family which he left as a sickening joke.

Prosper test-fired at a teddy bear in his bedroom shortly before he shot his mother in a hallway.

Then he turned the gun on his screaming sister hiding under a dining room table, and stabbed his brother more than 100 times before shooting him in the head.

Today, as the loner faces being jailed for decades, it can be revealed that Prosper was able to purchase a shotgun with ease simply by copying real certificates he found online.

He discovered that lethal weapons can be traded privately without any official checks if the buyer is able to produce a genuine-looking paper firearms certificate to the seller.

Under the current law, sellers have to notify police within seven days about the sale of a weapon.

But they don't have to check with police whether the buyer's firearms certificate is genuine before the purchase, creating a loophole whereby the new owner has a window to carry out an attack before anyone discovers the fake.

Prosper, now 19, downloaded a blank firearms certificate and used a website which allows you to amend pictures so he could create his own fake.

He was so proud of the forgery that when he was arrested, he couldn't resist bragging to officers: 'My name is Nicholas Prosper; you saw my fake shotgun certificate in my room in the 82 flat? Did you see the fake shotgun certificate I made?'

On August 30 last year Prosper contacted a gun owner on a trading website called Gun Star, offering him £600 – £150 over the £450 asking price – for the shotgun, claiming it was for clay pigeon shooting. Luton Crown Court was shown CCTV of the handover in a car park outside Prosper's home on September 12 where he produced the cash after inspecting the gun in a car boot.

Less than 24 hours later he would begin his shooting spree after staying up all night poring over sickening images of mass murder and school shootings.

Yesterday he smirked in the dock as the court heard how he later confessed in prison that he 'wanted to cause the biggest massacre in the 21st century', whispering to a horrified nurse: 'I wish I had killed more.'

Prosecutor Timothy Cray, KC, said: 'What drove him on most was the desire to be famous or infamous as a mass killer. This was killing for the sake of killing.

'The killing of his family was to be the first step in an even more shocking mass killing.

'Specifically, he wanted to imitate and even surpass other mass killers around the world.'

Prosper was bent on killing more children than the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, US, in 2012, when 20 died.

He spent a year researching local schools, carrying out surveillance on St Joseph's, capturing images of staff and pupils, checking assembly and lesson times and sketching class layouts.

He carefully assembled a 'killing costume' and spent months poring over 'images and audios that showed deep alienation from normal life and interest in the darkest sides of humanity, including people being killed or seriously injured and violent video games'.

Police found a diagram of the early years' classroom at St Joseph's in which Prosper had written 'Kill all'.

He had recorded videos of him practising the shooting with a piece of wood in his family kitchen and he uploaded a clip promising to shoot his sister an hour after the murders.

He claimed he planned to kill his family in their sleep before raping his sister, stating: 'Why so early? So I'd have time to cannibalise my family, and rape a woman at knife point before the shooting. 'Why? Because I could.'

But his mother woke up, forcing him to carry out his plan earlier than intended.

Yesterday Prosper's father Raymond said in a victim impact statement that 'part of my soul died' on the day of the killings.

Defending, David Bentley, KC, said Prosper was not a psychopath, but a 'socially impaired' teenager with 'autistic traits'.

He said: 'He is a young man who has gone down effectively an internet wormhole.'

Grinning, the killer rocked back and forth as his lawyer called his actions 'incomprehensible'.

Prosper admitted the murders at an earlier hearing, as well as possession of a shotgun with intent to endanger life. He will be sentenced today.