Paul Timms

Paul Timms was an 18-year-old from Tunbridge Wells who led a group of friends in Necropolis, an underground Black Metal band whose notoriety came not from recorded music but from attacks on churches and cemeteries. In 1994, Timms and his associates turned the theatrical defiance circulating around Norwegian Black Metal into a campaign of local vandalism. The episode shows how music, media attention, and the pursuit of subcultural recognition could become entangled with real-world crime, without making the band whose imagery Timms admired responsible for his actions.

Identity and Influences

By the spring of 1994, British coverage of the Scandinavian church arsons had made the Norwegian scene familiar to young fans. Reports in publications including Kerrang! relayed the actions and pronouncements of figures such as Varg Vikernes, Øystein Aarseth, and Fenriz. Vikernes’s claim that the arsons were acts of heathen terrorism particularly impressed a small group of teenagers in Tunbridge Wells. Timms, then 18, led the friends who formed Necropolis; the other named members were Dave Wharton, a 22-year-old postman, Mark Reeves, also 22, and Kevin Mooney, a 21-year-old British Airways engineer.

Necropolis existed as a band name and an underground affiliation, but the account identifies no music it had recorded. Its members’ attacks, by contrast, attracted attention far beyond what their music might have received. The book cites Kerrang!’s view that attacking churches was a means of earning respect and notoriety from the Norwegians. That explanation is an interpretation of the group’s ambitions, not evidence that the Norwegian musicians directed its crimes. Timms’s own subsequent reasoning, as reported by his girlfriend, also presents action as a test of personal consistency: he believed that failing to act against Christianity would make him a hypocrite, given the anti-Christian stance associated with Cradle of Filth.

The Campaign of Vandalism

Beginning in April 1994, Necropolis members attacked churchyards and religious buildings around Tunbridge Wells. Their first targets included graveyards in Rusthall and Tunbridge Wells, where they could knock over or break as many as sixty headstones in a single night. On Easter, the campaign escalated to St. Peter’s Church in Southborough and St. Mark’s Church in the group’s hometown. At St. Mark’s, they broke windows, destroyed the altar, shredded prayer books, and overturned religious artifacts. Timms later said that the group wished it had burned the church; he also claimed they would have attacked larger churches if they had access to explosives. These statements describe the scale of the group’s ambition, while the documented acts were desecration and vandalism rather than church arson.

The attacks continued. About a week after the Easter assaults, the group returned to St. Peter’s in Southborough and also targeted St. Peter’s Church in Fordcombe. In a final round of desecrations, graves in Speldhurst, Groombridge, and Frant were vandalized. Headstones were toppled, and cross-shaped stones were pulled up, inverted, and left standing upside down. The sequence—from graveyard damage to attacks on church interiors and repeated assaults across nearby communities—made Necropolis’s activity a sustained campaign rather than a single act of provocation.

The group’s stated rationale joined Satanism to a claim of historical revenge. Timms described the attacks as retaliation against Christians, arguing that Christian churches had been built over pagan sites. His girlfriend, Justine Turnbull, who was 16, recalled him explaining that he would otherwise be a hypocrite. She said she admired the consistency he claimed to show and, when asked whether the group had gone too far, did not think it had. Her account records the approval surrounding Timms’s actions within his private circle; it does not lessen the damage to the churches, graveyards, or those connected to them.

Arrest and Sentencing

The members were arrested after police received an anonymous tip. On May 27, 1994, officers carried out simultaneous raids. Wharton, Reeves, and Mooney were initially brought in, while the police did not yet know of Timms’s connection to the group. A homemade Necropolis poster found during the house searches depicted all four members and helped investigators identify Timms as a suspect. He was arrested two days later. The account suggests that someone may have overheard him discussing the crimes with his girlfriend in a pub, but presents that as a possible source of the tip, not an established fact.

At a court hearing presided over by a Catholic judge, Timms wore a Cradle of Filth T-shirt bearing an anti-Christian slogan. The youths had expected community-service sentences, but instead received prison terms of two and a half years. When a prison warden asked what he wanted to eat, Timms asked for a Bible; he then refused food for four days before giving up that request. The reported minimum cost of the damage was £100,000, with the final amount possibly higher. The sentence and financial assessment set a concrete legal and material consequence against the group’s effort to turn symbolic rebellion into public action.

Reputation and the Limits of Association

The Reverend John Banner described the desecrations as organized to cause serious offense and likened the group’s conduct to a military operation. He subsequently used the case to argue for banning Black Metal and Death Metal music in the U.K., attributing most of the blame to the music and its teachings. The book presents that response alongside a crucial qualification: the press reported that Timms had regular contact with U.K. Black Metal bands, including Gomorrah and Cradle of Filth, but Cradle of Filth had no connection to the crimes. Its singer, Dani, recalled meeting Timms once after a concert and described him as an admirer of the band; the encounter did not amount to participation or direction.

Timms’s story thus sits at the intersection of imitation and distinction. He drew on a public image of Norwegian Black Metal, and on claims that church destruction could express anti-Christian defiance, but the campaign in Kent was his group’s own course of action. In a scene where identity and recognition could be shaped by dramatic gestures, Necropolis gained attention through crimes rather than recordings. The aftermath also exposed the risks of treating an entire musical genre as the cause of individual acts: Timms and his associates were prosecuted for their own conduct, while the association of their crimes with celebrated bands became a separate and contested part of the story.