DESPITE THIS LACK OF FAMILY COHESION, EVERYONE LIVED IN COMPARATIVE HARMONY WITH ONE ANOTHER. Although there were no big family fallouts or jealousy or fighting to be number one in the pack, Dad used to get annoyed with Ben, the eldest, because he used to be quite bossy towards me and my younger brothers. I think he thought he was an extra parent.
I remember when I was six years old, two of my brothers were in a bedroom and somehow a mirror got broken. Dad raced up to see what the noise was. Ben and Adam blamed me; they used me as a scapegoat. In anger, I charged through to my room – at this time my bedroom was upstairs – where I had a mattress on the floor, as we were waiting for beds to be delivered.
Dad stormed into my room after me with a look of thunder on his face. He took his slipper off and used it to smack me. It wasn’t just like smack, smack and ‘You’re done, don’t do it again.’ I had never been assaulted before, but from the anger in his eyes I knew as he took his slipper off that something sinister was about to happen.
I was in fear, but what could I do at six years old against a grown man? I wanted to cry out that I wasn’t responsible for the broken mirror but my voice was almost stifled by my fear. I just managed to cry out, ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’
There was no stopping my dad as, slipper in hand, he manhandled me and violently struck my bottom with the sole. In between each whack, and with perfect timing, he seethed through his clenched teeth, ‘You will not sit down for a month, young lady.’
After he had finished dishing out the punishment, I was left there sobbing. My mother was out at work. I feel that if she had been at home at that particular time she would have taken an eye for an eye as far as my dad’s actions were concerned. It wasn’t until the following day that I was able to reveal the damage he had caused to me by showing her the purple, telltale welts that were the legacy of his fury.
With a rumbling rage that was barely hidden beneath her apparent calmness, Mum ordered me, ‘Go upstairs.’ The next thing I knew, World War III had broken out. What did Dad expect? I seem to recall there was an apology from him when I came downstairs later on, but I am not totally sure about this, as it is the attack that remains in my mind more than what followed. I do remember my dad looking sheepish after having had the wrath of Mum inflicted upon him.
When she came home, she had picked up on the fact that something had gone on, because there was an atmosphere in the house. I was still upstairs in my bedroom, and the boys were still in theirs. To Mum, I was conspicuous by my absence, so she came upstairs and got out of me what had happened, and that is when it exploded into all hell.
After the carry-on with the slipper, I soon managed to bounce back the Hailey way and set about living the life of a normal little girl. I had experienced the humiliating pain of a punishment slippering for the first time.
But, with anything to do with sex, I was as innocent as a newborn baby. So, when a boy I knew tried to get me to perform a sexual act on him when I was eight years old, it was alien to me. The sex act he tried to coax me into involved him exposing his penis to me.
It all started when he was at my house and my mum was out at work. That day, we were playing hide and seek. The boys’ bedrooms had bunk beds and I was hiding underneath one of these, not on the bottom bunk. I was lying on my front and he was on the bunk above me. Then I poked my head out and he got off the bed and knelt down beside me.
That was when he exposed his penis to me. He was about 13 or 14 at the time. I can’t recall if his penis was flaccid or erect. I do know, though, that I was shocked and bewildered. But what was to follow was even more shocking and incomprehensible.
‘Just put this in your mouth,’ he said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he was offering me a sweet.
‘What!’ I cried in alarm at the idea of this unnatural act. All I knew about the penis was that it was dirty because boys had a wee from it.
He repeatedly said, ‘Just do it, it won’t hurt.’
I kept saying, ‘No. No, I don’t want to.’
I was still underneath the bunk bed, lying on my front, and he was still kneeling with his penis exposed, just inches from my face. He kept alternately sweet-talking and badgering me to suck it. His pestering of me continued for about ten minutes.
Then he said something along the lines of ‘It’ll taste fine, because I’ll put toothpaste on it.’
In fact, he wanted me to put the toothpaste on his penis. Being an eight-year-old girl, I didn’t know the meaning of it all. I just knew it wasn’t right. I wasn’t even aware that this was a sexual situation. Eventually, he said he would apply the toothpaste himself and he went and got it, obviously believing that this was the only way he could get me to suck his penis.
The next thing I knew, he had the toothpaste tube in his hand and he had started to coat his penis with it. Obviously, either he’d done it before or his warped mind had worked out that little girls would prefer to suck a penis that tasted of toothpaste.
As he rubbed it in, he extolled the virtues of his toothpaste-coated penis. ‘It will taste fine,’ he tried to reassure me.
I was still verbally resisting his pleas as I lay on my stomach with my head sticking out, but, although I was a little vulnerable, he didn’t get hold of me physically.
At the time I didn’t know what masturbation was, but he was masturbating in front of me while continually asking me to suck his penis. He wasn’t threatening; there was no air of menace in his voice: it was more like pleading with me.
Then, about 20 minutes after he had first knelt down beside me, it all ended. I think he left the room and I came out from beneath the bunk bed.
Soon afterwards, in the typical way a perpetrator of such crimes acts, he came up to me and asked me not to tell anyone about what had happened. ‘Don’t tell your mum or dad or anything,’ I think he said.
‘No, I won’t,’ I replied innocently. And then he left.
He didn’t say why I shouldn’t tell Mum and I didn’t fully understand the implications of what he had just done, other than that it was dirty. When I was older, of course, I realised what had happened: my innocence had been taken advantage of by this older boy.
It was some seven years after that day before I divulged the details to anyone. I had been asked to attend a meeting with social services, because I was continually leaving home without my parents’ permission. Some might have argued at the time that I had invented the whole thing just to get attention, but I could have thought of better ways than raising such an embarrassing issue, especially as it concerned someone close to my family committing an indecent act in front of me.
In view of what I said about the boy to social services, the police had him in for questioning. I couldn’t tell you if they came and arrested him, but I do know that he was in the police station with his solicitor and his mother was present during his interview.
When he was interviewed – and this is only what I heard about a year ago – he just started crying and saying, ‘I love Hailey, I would never do anything to hurt her.’
He also sent a text message to Colin about what Huntley did to me. It read: ‘I could have killed him after what he did to Hailey. I would never do anything to hurt her.’ And in a text message to me he wrote: ‘You ripped me to pieces when you said that about me.’
I recall that, in a phone conversation in which I spoke to Mum and Dad about it, I said, ‘I’m not going to drag it through the courts. I can’t anyway, but obviously the police have decided what they are going to do and what they are not going to do.’
In some text messages he sent, and in particular the one where he writes about what he will do to Huntley, he went on to write: ‘…she killed me when she said that about me and all this.’
So I put it to him that he should take a lie-detector test. ‘I am going to pay for it. I will sit and have mine done. Come on, you want to prove that you are not lying, prove your innocence or whatever. You come with me, you don’t have to speak to me if you don’t want to; you can go on your own. I will go and have mine done and you go and have yours done.
‘I’ve got nothing to prove, you know,’ I added. ‘You are saying you want to prove your innocence and you are stating that you never did what you did to me, so go for a lie-detector test.
‘I’ll pay for it but, boy, you had better have a damn good memory, because I have got a good memory. Because I have got no reason to lie about what happened and I remember it as if it was yesterday. I can remember details, word for word. I bet you don’t, because you are the one that is lying about it.
‘You know whether I am telling the truth or not. How about you?’
And he said to me, ‘I’m not having one of them done. You can’t force me to.’
I rejected what he said with, ‘Well, that is guilt over and done with then, but I would still go for one, even if you didn’t. I would still be prepared to go for one tomorrow.’
I know a lie-detector test is not like a judge and jury examining a case, but I believe that it can prove whether you are lying or not, so I would be happy to go for one to show that I have not just been fantasising about it all.
In early 2004, I got a number of death threats. The person issuing them also spoke to Colin, saying he was this and he was that, and Colin told him, ‘Well, listen, mate, you are the one that did this and exposed yourself and did this and that to Hailey.’
After that, the idea was never brought up again, because I think my mother probably mentioned it to him and he would have said something like: ‘I am not having one done because I have got nothing to prove.’
I haven’t been able to speak with him face-to-face since that conversation, only over the phone or via texts. He had moved away from the area before I had actually left home. As far as I am concerned, the police investigation into my allegation sent a great message of comfort out to any abuser: ‘Go home, son, or go to the pub and get yourself a stiff drink.’
And did the police come and see me over the matter? No. Did they interview me? No. Did social services tell me the outcome of the matter? No. No one did.
All I was told was that, if he had done it, the police would have charged him. That is the same scenario as when I raised the allegations against Ian Huntley, years before he killed to satisfy his evil lust. How many more predators are the police going to let slip through their net?
To say the police have failed me is an understatement. In five years’ time, or fifty, the truth will come out. I refused to testify against Huntley in court – my feeling was, why should I help the police out when I felt that they hadn’t helped me.
I am in full-blown bereavement at being deprived of police help or even sympathy. Justice, may you rest in peace, because you are dead.