Emma Willis feels ‘sick’ after discovering she’s descended from an attempted murderer

The Celebrity Big Brother presenter ended up in tears 

Celebrity Big Brother Emma Willis was deeply distressed after discovering she’s descended from an attempted murderer as part of BBC One ancestry show Who Do You Think You Are.

At the start of the show, Willis said she was hoping to find ‘kind’ ancestors who reflected her immediate family: “I come from a kind family, and I hope that that has been history repeating itself.”

However, while she discovered that some of her distant family members fitted this description there was one who had a very violent past.

The presenter was told that Richard Fowler (her five-time great-grandfather) had attempted to murder a blacksmith and his son.

Emma Willis (front left) with her paternal grandparents Edna & Bill Griffiths, her mother Cathy and her sister Sharon in the Eighties
BBC

The 41-year-old read from a newspaper report on the incident that detailed how Fowler had broken into the house of a Michael Egan and brutally attacked him and his son.

It read: “And on the very instant that they appeared, they were knocked down and received many desperate stabs. Naked and bleeding as they were, and daring to complain of such treatment, were knocked down again and beaten in the most unmerciful manner.”

Willis was visibly shocked while reading the report, and later explained that the revelation of Fowler’s crimes had made her feel ‘sick’.

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“I felt quite sick when I was reading it because it’s so detailed, it didn’t leave much to the imagination,” she said.

“It was just so the polar opposite to what I expected, I was just speechless if I’m honest.”

Elsewhere in the programme Willis heard about a family member called James Gretton from her hometown of Birmingham – a Victorian hairbrush dealer who went bankrupt and died in a workhouse.

Who Do You Think You Are continues on August 17 at 9pm on BBC One.

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