Apart from locking him up, of course, what Huntley’s conviction has done is to open a can of worms. It has revealed a grim picture of confusion created by the Data Protection Act and exacerbated by the Human Rights Act over what information police can keep about suspected paedophiles.
In my opinion, blame was fairly apportioned to the two Chief Constables at the centre of the Huntley case: Tom Lloyd of Cambridgeshire and David Westwood of Humberside. After all, it was ‘check system’ mistakes made by the Cambridgeshire Force that resulted in Huntley getting a job at Soham Village College. During police background checks into Huntley on a national police database, his name and date of birth were entered incorrectly. And, like others, I blame many of the investigative problems on David Westwood, formerly Chief Constable of Humberside, who failed to identify Huntley as a danger, even though I had said in a police video interview in 1998, when I was 12, that Huntley had sexually assaulted me. I hope this extract from that interview will convince you of my sincerity about my allegation:
Police officer: Can you tell me, what do you think made Huntley allow you to leave the woods?
Hailey: Because I told him that my mum worked at the Grosvenor and that I had agreed to meet her there.
Police officer: So what did he say when you left him in the woods?
Hailey: He said if I told anyone what had happened or wrote anything in a diary that he would come and kill me and I then ran away from him and he chased me.
Police officer: Had you had any problems with him in the past, I mean did he ever hurt you before?
Hailey: No, never, he was always kind to me.
Police officer: How did you feel when all this was happening to you, Hailey?
Hailey: I kept on saying to myself, ‘Oh, why, oh why is this happening to me,’ and hoped someone would come and help me, but nobody came.
Police officer: You tell me, Hailey, that you told your brother Hayden about what happened to you three weeks after; what was his reply?
Hailey: He said, ‘Oh, you do make up such big lies,’ and I said, ‘No, honestly. It did really happen.’
Police officer: How do you feel about Ian now?
Hailey: I don’t like him very much at all and he makes me feel sick.
Police officer: What do you think should happen to Ian now?
Hailey: I would like to see him prosecuted, for him to understand what he has done to me and to stop him from doing it to anyone else.
Police officer: So you were good friends with Katie Webber, you say. Are you still close now?
Hailey: No, I don’t see her now because she stopped seeing me after he did that to me.
Police officer: So you mean, after Ian did that to you, Katie stopped coming to see you, right, after what he did?
Hailey: Yep.
What I can’t understand is how easily heads could roll because the government didn’t want egg on their face, while I can be walked all over by everyone that has failed me without any recourse.
David Westwood claimed his force had been obliged to ‘weed out’ accusations against Huntley which did not lead to convictions. The office of the Information Commissioner, the government’s data protection watchdog, condemned this claim and for this reason I feel I have recourse against the Humberside Police Force.
Assistant Commissioner David Smith said, ‘Their explanation appears to be nonsense from what we know of the information they were keeping.
‘The information was clearly relevant to protecting the public and there’s nothing in the Data Protection Act or in any guidance we’ve issued that required them to delete information of such obvious value.’
That is where I rest my case. The police knew of allegations against Huntley and they decided he wasn’t even worthy of a few minutes’ time and effort to keep his details logged, but they could apply the time and effort, they admit, to ‘weed out’ his details. This, I say, is an excuse. It would not have been all weeded out back in July 1998, when I made my allegation. Why didn’t they act then?
Another thing strikes me as bizarre. The police claim to be deluged with complex guidance on data protection, which they have to pass to their own lawyers, and the police must comply with the legal minefield of the Human Rights Act.
The Humberside Police claimed that, in a case of alleged underage sexual intercourse, they did not prosecute unless a complainant brought a charge. This is rubbish. They prosecuted my prospective husband over that very charge, and named me as the victim. Yet I never raised a complaint – it was my parents that did. The very same police force that failed me has made my life a hell.
To end this chapter, I leave the final words to the Bichard Inquiry, which determined that the Humberside Police Force prepared a file on my case in which there was a confidential disclosure form that was ‘inaccurate in almost every respect.’
7
CANNABIS AND WHITE POWDER
MY INNOCENCE NOW STOLEN, THE SUNNY OUTLOOK I ONCE HAD ON LIFE WAS TRANSFORMED AFTER THE ATTACK. My hair still flowed right down to my lower back, and people used to comment, ‘Isn’t your hair lovely?’ or ‘I’d love hair like yours.’ This was after the attack but before I had revealed to my mum what had happened to me. I used to shy away from them and say, ‘Don’t touch my hair.’ I hated being pawed and gawped at.
I remember one time Mum said she wanted to know about something and, looking back now, it was quite petty and I kicked up a real fuss. I found it hard to deal with stupid little things. If my mum were to say to me, ‘You’re not going out to the swimming disco on Thursday if you don’t tidy your room,’ come Thursday, I wouldn’t have done what she had asked me to do.
I stayed in my bedroom all Thursday night and, in a fit of rage, I got some scissors and sheared off all my locks of flaxen hair so it barely reached down to my jaw line.
In those days I just couldn’t bear anything. If somebody said no when I expected a yes, or if someone called me a name, I just couldn’t handle things like that and it used to really weigh me down.
Sometimes in arguments I would say to my mum, ‘I hate you!’ She would say, ‘I don’t like you either.’ I would feel like killing myself. Nobody likes me, I used to think. That would be just because one person said they didn’t like me. Because of that, I would think that that was what everybody must think.
But getting back to this particular time when I cut all my hair off because I had a disagreement with my mum. The next morning, I woke up and went to the bathroom to do my hair. I could only just fit what was left of my hair into a tiny bobble and then I went downstairs.
Mum was gobsmacked. ‘What the hell have you done to your hair?’ she burst out.
I reacted furiously: ‘Get out of my way. I don’t care about you, just leave me alone. I don’t want it long.’
Then I went off to school with my hair looking terrible. It was a real messy cut, of course, because I’d just gathered my hair into a bobble and cut it all off.
After that, I started cutting my arms with anything. If I had a bad day at school, I would cut my arms. Because I had control over that, I could stop and start whenever I felt like it. But there was another thing where I had no control: after the attack when I was 11, I used to wet the bed every single night until I was about 14. My planets had collided all right.
When I was cutting my arms, I was being hurt in a controlled way rather than hurt in an uncontrolled way. I could control and tolerate the hurt.
When I was doing this, people didn’t notice what was happening, as I was good at concealing it. My main areas of attack were the tops of my arms. I was doing my best to conceal a symptom of what the Huntley attack had done to me. That symptom was the desire not only to blame myself but to physically harm myself.
Several studies of self-harm confirm that it’s a serious issue, so I’ll give you the details. Studies like Gratz et al. (2002), Van der Kolk, Perry and Herman (1991), and Zlotnick et al. (1996) found that individuals who engage in self-harm report unusually high rates of histories
of childhood sexual abuse, childhood physical abuse, emotional neglect, insecure attachment and prolonged separation from caregivers. The first of these in particular applies to my circumstances.
I know self-harm was an abysmal way for a girl of that age to handle the emotional pain, but what else could I do apart from kill myself. In my opinion, I was now worthless and no one liked me. Also, I didn’t have the supportive family that any child of that age will benefit from.
Psychologically, I was a wreck and, had I not cracked and revealed what had happened to me, I’m sure I would have killed myself just to escape the ordeal. My self-destruct button had been pressed and I was on a collision course with death.
When I did tell my mum and the police were called in, it was like having a massive weight lifted from my shoulders. I was sure Huntley would be sent to prison for the rest of his life and that would mean he wouldn’t be able to come and kill me or anything like that. But, as you now know, the police decided not to do anything and it was all made ten times worse for me because of that. The spectre of Huntley haunts me to this very day, and it will until I get closure on it.
In retrospect, had the police pursued my case to the nth degree, perhaps even got Huntley to court, my belief would in part still be there – although that is easy to say, because he could have appeared in court and been found not guilty. And then would I be saying these things now about how happy I would have been to get him to court? I know that, when I get him into court for this – which I will – that I will win. I have no doubt of that.
The way I look at it now, I see the police begging victims of crime to come forward, and especially in cases like this, as soon as possible after the crime has been committed. It is all very well the men in grey suits saying that, but, in the aftermath of such an intimate violation you can feel somehow as if it is you who is the criminal.
I know I would be able to defend myself against an attack now, but at that time I was only 11. Then again, I think what more than anything else may have saved me from being killed by Huntley was my passiveness.
To me, justice has not been served, even though he is behind bars. Justice has not been delivered. There has been no closure on that score. For me, it still lives on. If Huntley and others can get away with a crime as serious as what he did to me, what other crimes have such criminals got away with? Why has it had to come to murder before it is taken seriously?
My self-image and self-esteem were low, I think, from when the attack happened to me until I started puberty at about 14. I used to dress like a boy. I used to wear boxer shorts to school and my brother’s trousers or his school shirts.
Cleanliness was not a strong point as I was still wetting the bed but didn’t like taking a bath. I began to have a phobia about getting into the bath because it reminded me of the night I came home and bleached myself from head to toe.
Looking back, I didn’t want to make myself look nice or for anybody to compliment me on my hair, my looks or my clothes, or to say, ‘God, you are beautiful.’ I didn’t want any attention whatsoever from men. I wanted to be repulsive; that was my defence. And then nobody would come near me again.
But even though I didn’t want praise, when people put me down that also hurt. By making myself repulsive, I was my own worst enemy. It was as though I was trapped and there was no way out. I was caught in a vicious circle: I was never going to get a compliment and therefore I could remain for ever in that little prison I had created for myself, looking unattractive.
At the same time, I longed to be beautiful and to have my long hair and wear make-up and have long nails. But I was still scared that someone would do to me again what Huntley had done. If I kept myself ugly and showed my nastiness at school, maybe it would provoke people into calling me names, and that was what I wanted. This, of course, perpetuated the trap I was in.
In time, I started to get used to the persistent name-calling; it was like water off a duck’s back, and I needed a bigger kick. I had progressed to stealing and smoking cannabis, and then there was the white powder, although, when I was admitted for a drugs overdose, the hospital couldn’t tell what it was. I was mixing in the wrong circles, but the right circles for my condition.
I didn’t know how to cope with the feelings of abandonment, of desolation, that were so strong within me. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I now know that it was post-traumatic stress disorder, but who cared?
My relationship with my family had sunk to an all-time low. I had gone off the rails and my eldest brothers, Ben, Adam and Hayden, used to call me names. To them, I was a druggy, a thief and all the rest of it, but, apart from Hayden, they weren’t told of Huntley’s attack; they didn’t know what I was going through.
Ben, my half-brother from my mother’s first marriage, was trying to be a father-figure. ‘You will do this because, if not, you will have me to deal with,’ he would tell me. He had a controlling attitude and tried to force his will on me. I didn’t want that.
I couldn’t sneeze without him being there and telling me off for it. One time I was with my best friend Harriet at her house after my mum had punished me for doing one thing or another. I think it was for coming home half an hour or an hour late. This didn’t happen that often because, if they said I had to be in by eight, then I would be in by eight, but this time she said, ‘Right, you use this house like a hotel. You and Harriet can go to her mum’s house.’
Because Harriet’s mum didn’t have much money, she couldn’t afford to buy us drinks or food or anything like that, and all due respect to Harriet’s mum, because she was a nice lady, but we both more or less lived on toast. I used to think, Oh God, I’m starving.
I would go back home and I would say to my mum, ‘I’ve only had two slices of toast today.’
Her punishment was to say, ‘You go there, you live the way you want to live. You go and stay there.’
And I would reply angrily, ‘Right, OK.’
When I came back to stay temporarily, my mum’s brother, Uncle Kev, said, ‘I’ll treat you lot to Skegness.’ He was offering to take us to see his son, my cousin Jordan, sing on stage.
That would be fantastic, I thought. But Mum laid down one proviso, telling me, ‘Yes, that’s fine, as long as you are good.’
Harriet and I got dressed nicely and did our hair, nails and make-up. We came down the stairs and I went to the fridge, took out two Penguin bars and offered one to Harriet.
‘What are you doing?’ said the ever-vigilant Ben.
I started to give him a running commentary. ‘I’m just having a chocolate bar…’
‘No you are not,’ he interrupted. ‘You can put that back.’
I was taken aback by his immature pettiness. ‘Excuse me, I’m hungry,’ I shot back, ‘and I’m having a chocolate bar. You don’t even live here.’ At that time he had his own house.
‘Put it back now,’ he ordered loudly.
So I did, but I made my anger clear, insisting, ‘But I’m hungry.’
He sounded like Mum when he accused me, ‘You use this house like a hotel.’
I said, ‘Why, because I go out to work on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights? It’s not like I’m going out and standing on a street corner.’ I was waitressing at a pub on those evenings, but more about that later.
This Penguin incident developed into a full-blown argument. At the dining table Ben kept winding me up so that I lost my patience and snapped at him. Still he wouldn’t stop. He was having a go at me in front of Harriet. If I complained to Mum or Dad about things like this, they would just say, ‘Well, don’t wind him up then.’ It wasn’t a case of pulling the dog’s teeth: it was more a case of avoiding the dog in the first place.
When Uncle Kev arrived, he asked, ‘Has Ben been having a go at you again?’
‘Yes,’ I told him.
In fact, my uncle had just walked past the conservatory and seen what was going on, so he said to Ben, ‘Leave her alone.’
‘Shut up,’ the usually mouthy Be
n croaked weakly.
With my brother Hayden, it was like a love/hate relationship and Adam still called me names, but not as much as the rest of them.
If I were to get the milk out of the fridge, pour it in a glass, put it down and just leave the carton there for a minute while I drank this milk, he would order, ‘Get that lid back on that milk and stick it back in the fridge, you lazy little sod.’
‘I was just going to drink it and then pour some more in. I’m dying of thirst,’ I would say.
‘Get it back in the fridge, now,’ he would bleat relentlessly.
He used to taunt me, call me names like ‘you little bitch’, but it was more a case of ‘I will control you and you will do as I say’. It seemed that they all wanted some control over me, including Huntley. I think the more inferior a man feels, the more he wants to exert control over anyone he deems to be weaker than him.
So you can see how things were at home. No wonder I never knew what real love was until I met Colin. I’d tried to escape all that at 13 by running away from home. I ended up living in an open house with about six lads and eight girls. I knew all of the lads and most of the girls because they were Hayden’s friends. I would like it to be known that there was no sexual involvement between any of the boys and me. They were more like how brothers should be, because they looked out for me. They were there with their girlfriends. I was just using that space to clear away family cobwebs, to escape problems at home.
I lived there and I thought it was fine; I knew people who lived in that surrounding area, and I hoped to work at McDonald’s. Even though I was only 13, I wanted to get a job and claim my independence. I knew these girls that worked at McDonald’s, but I couldn’t get hold of them and for about four days I didn’t have anything to eat. I was literally starving and there was no food whatsoever in the house.
Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived Page 11