We were doing up the house and a guy called Andy was hanging some doors for my mum. One of them was leaning against the wall and I was standing with my back to it, and my friend Harriet was standing at the other side of the room.
‘For God’s sake, Dad,’ I raged. ‘I’m off across the road to the shop. I’m not being rude, but I’m off to the shop. Don’t you tell me what you are going to do.’
Whether he believed I was going to the shop or not, I didn’t have a clue. We got into this big argument about me going to the shop. I was saying yes and he was saying no. He started screaming and shouting and giving me a lecture. That’s when he lost a grip on his sanity and whacked me across my face. This man has hands like shovels and it was full pelt. Harriet and Andy were really shocked at what they witnessed.
I started crying and then I went quiet. I went up to my bedroom and put on a CD that he didn’t like: Eminem’s album with all the swearing.
My adrenalin was surging. I was angry. I don’t believe in a woman hitting a man or a man hitting a woman. You want to treat me like a bitch and you think that I am such a naughty little cow, I’ll show you what one is, I thought. I had my windows open with the stereo on full blast, thinking, I don’t care.
I stood there brushing my hair, getting ready to go out. My dad came into my bedroom. He had calmed down and he was thinking, Andy has just seen me smack my daughter in the face.
But then he shouted, ‘Turn that shit off.’
I stood my ground and replied, ‘No. You think I’m a naughty little sod and you can smack me in the face… then go for it. But I’m going to be a horrible little cow now. Then at least you’ve got a reason to smack me in the face.’
He was going on and on and on and I just lost it. ‘Get out of my room,’ I shouted, and chucked the hairbrush at him. When I was scared I used to shout and scream. I soon learned after the Huntley assault to use my vocal cords. I was scared now, and there was no other way that I could express my feelings apart from shouting, because my dad was a big man with a loud voice and built like you know what.
Harriet came upstairs and I said, ‘Now can you see why I hate being here, because it’s like this near enough every other day.’
‘Do you want my honest opinion?’ she said, because she was sensible.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I would leave. I wouldn’t put up with that,’ she told me.
By this time Dad had left the room and gone downstairs. When I went down he had gone out. Andy was hanging the doors and he asked, ‘Crikey, are you all right?’
I told him, ‘Nobody messes with me, you see. What goes around comes around.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘One day he’ll be old,’ I said. ‘I mean, when he’s a little frail 70-year-old man. He’ll be going to the betting shop and some young thug as big as he was will land one on him. Then I’ll have the upper hand. I don’t need to go around hitting people to get my way.’
Andy asked me, ‘Do you want a fag?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said gratefully.
So we had a fag and that was that. Nothing more was mentioned about it. When Mum found out, unlike when my dad had first hit me years earlier, she gave her usual couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s reply: ‘Well, you shouldn’t be messing about, you shouldn’t be winding people up then, Hailey.’
I had become used to her and how she displaced the blame from the two of them to me. The truth was that I felt displaced by the needs of my brothers. I felt like the black sheep. Of course, the boys were like, ‘I will protect you, Mum. Nobody will touch you, Mum, and if David Baxter comes round I will cave his head in.’ Big mouths but nothing in their trousers to compensate when it came to action. They could talk the talk but not walk the walk.
Anyway, going back to the social services, when they came round the second time they said, ‘We’re going back to your mum’s.’
I warned, ‘Fine, have it your way, but she won’t have me back.’
She may have made it crystal clear to social services that she wanted me back, and whinged on at the press and to the whole world, ‘I want my daughter back.’ But I knew differently.
These social workers, a man and a woman, seemed pretty clueless to me. They were like, ‘Well, we understand it, Hailey, because, you know, you keep running away from home.’
‘Excuse me, I didn’t run away from home,’ I corrected them.
No wonder they cock things up and end up in the newspapers because of their incompetence. It was like the blind leading the blind. Social services were really no use to me and didn’t pay any attention to my personal welfare. They just wanted my case off their books. I was just a 15-year-old girl out there, all alone.
Anyway, I ended up being taken to this house and I was left outside in the car and the idiot social workers said to me, ‘We’re going to lock the doors.’
I protested, ‘No, you’re not locking me in this car. You trust me that I am not going to do a runner. Here I am in a strange place, it’s one o’clock in the morning and I don’t know where I am. I’m not going to be running off anywhere, mate, because I don’t know where I’m going.’
The male social worker moaned, ‘Oh, Hailey, don’t be so silly.’
‘No, I think you are being pathetic locking me in this car,’ I told him. ‘If you want me to come with you, then I will come with you, but don’t go locking me in any frigging car.’
Defeated, he replied, ‘Right, OK, have it your way.’
I sat there and when they came back they confirmed what I’d predicted. ‘We’ve made a call to your mum,’ they said. ‘She has said that she doesn’t want you back. She doesn’t want you because you have hurt the family and she has got to put her kids first.’
She had told them, ‘No! I am not having her back. She does what she wants. I have washed my hands of her now.’
‘Right, fine. She can have it her way,’ I said.
After this, they took me to an orphanage in Queen’s Parade, in Cleethorpes. They rolled up there and said inappropriately, ‘Here’s Hailey’s report. She is a runaway.’
Social services in this country have a lot to answer for. I resented this tag and spat, ‘I am not a runaway. My mum kicked me out of that house and said to me, “Don’t bother coming back to this house, right?”’
So here I was, classified as a runaway. In reality, I was a tearaway. I have been let down on more than one account by more than one agency. I’ve been let down across the board.
I wish, looking back at how things have turned out between Colin and me, that my mum, who made such a fuss about our being together, had made half the fuss about what Huntley did to me. Yet nothing was done about that. The man that did hurt me and the man that did cause me so much damage and pain wasn’t punished. But the man that was bringing me happiness and that I felt safe and secure with – Colin – has had all the flack.
So there I was, unwanted by my parents, dumped in this care home in the middle of the night. I had gone from being ‘the belle of the house’, as my mum claimed, to being a sexually abused outcast… damaged goods. Thanks, Mum.
10
KIDNAPPED AND TRAPPED
‘WELL,’ ASKED THE LADY IN THE CARE HOME, WHO HAD SOMETHING OF CRUELLA DEVIL ABOUT HER, ‘HAVE YOU HAD SOMETHING TO EAT?’
‘I’m not hungry,’ I snapped.
She replied coldly, with all the grace of a concentration camp commandant, ‘Well, if you don’t have something to eat now, it will go on to your report.’
‘What report?’ I asked.
Taunting me, she replied, ‘You will have to be force-fed if you don’t eat for a certain amount of time.’
I decided to meet this ice queen halfway by saying, ‘No, I’ll eat in the morning,’ but it was something like one o’clock in the morning now.
My compromise seemed to have melted some of her coldness away, and she said, ‘Well, as long as you eat breakfast in the morning, then.’
‘Right, OK then,’ I said.
She told me where my room was and warned me, ‘Mind, take your bag with you, lock the door and make sure none of the other kids come down and nick your stuff.’
By this time I was thinking, Well, I’ve got nothing to take, really. All I owned in the world was a pair of trousers.
Morning soon arrived and there was a lot of hustle and bustle as everyone was going out. One would say, ‘I am off to my singing lesson,’ and another, ‘I am off to my ballet lesson.’ What a perfect little life you have got, I thought. I know it sounds horrible, but there was this little girl there, really posh, and she said, ‘I’m off to my dancing lesson. Would you like to come?’ Just shut up, I was thinking, as in reality I was oozing with jealousy.
These were a carer’s own children, and they were going to their dancing lessons. I was wishing that I could just be normal, like going swimming on a Saturday.
I brushed my teeth, cleaned round my room, took my bag and locked my door. I was still thinking hard when one of the carers said to me, ‘Hailey, what are you doing today?’
‘Can I go out?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never been in one of these places before. Are you allowed to leave the premises or are you held prisoner, sort of thing?’
She shook her head frantically from side to side as she replied, ‘No, no, we couldn’t do that, because you can ring the police and say that we’re holding you hostage. No. You can go out. Once a week we give you pocket money, £9.’
It was all falling into place. ‘Right,’ I said. So they could force-feed you but weren’t allowed to keep you prisoner. Very strange.
She asked, ‘Would you like yours next week or now? Because if you have it next week you can have £18, but if you want it now you can have £9.’
Holding in my excitement at the prospect of being able to leave the place and being paid to do so, I replied casually, ‘I’m going to go to my friend’s and she only lives around the corner. I want to take a video with me and we could watch that and have a pizza.’
‘Have your £9 now, then,’ she said. ‘But take your stuff with you, though, Hailey, because I don’t want anybody going in your bag and nicking it.’
I was on cloud nine as I replied, ‘Yeah. OK. Put my stuff in my bag, right. See you later.’
As I sauntered out of the door, her voice trailed off as she said, ‘Right. Remember, be back for curfew at five o’clock.’
I had the stare of a fashion mannequin as I said, ‘OK, yeah.’
On the bus from Grimsby to Hull, I ended up drinking. Knock, knock, knock… I was back at Colin’s house. He told me to go back to Michaela’s, so I went there and I ended up staying, and she called social services again. I didn’t return to the care home.
I expected to go through the pillar-to-post scenario again, as Michaela phoned social services to tell them I was back at her place.
Then, in the local corner shop near Colin’s house, there was a poster on display with the heading ‘WANTED FOR KIDNAPPING’ and a photograph of Colin’s face. I found out from Michaela that Colin had gone into this shop and asked, ‘Who put that up there?’
‘This woman with short dark hair,’ came the reply. That description fitted my mum.
‘Take it down,’ Colin demanded.
She could only have got hold of a photo of Colin from one of two places: the police or his ex-wife. To be honest, I don’t think Colin was bothered that much about it, because he thought, I haven’t really done anything wrong.
It was my mum behind it all. She had gone round Hull putting up posters saying that Colin was wanted for kidnapping and giving the Crimestoppers phone number. My picture was plastered all over the place as well. She was even going around knocking on strangers’ doors saying, ‘Do you know this bloke?’ She wasn’t claming underage sex was going on; she was just wallowing in self-pity, saying, ‘He has kidnapped my little girl.’ Oh, what a shame she never applied as much effort when Huntley assaulted me.
Colin never kidnapped me. I was the one that kept running back to Hull to be near him, and I was now at Michaela’s again, not far from Colin’s. Several times she said, ‘I’m going to call social services.’
There was one point when I pleaded, ‘Please, don’t.’
She asked, ‘Why?’
I said, ‘Because they will just end up picking me up and taking me back.’
I was beginning to understand the consequences of Michaela calling them. To her credit, she told me, ‘Hailey, I am getting wise to it now and if this carries on I will put my foot down,’ but she still continued to call social services and the police and say, ‘Yes, Hailey is here and she is fine.’
By this time, Colin had started a new line of work. He had saved some money from working in the factory, had a phone installed in his house and was now working as a plumber. After a short while, he got a house in a nice area and I moved in with him. We were living together legally now, as I was 16 and Colin had had his bail conditions relaxed so that I could live there.
Before that, Colin had been on bail for supposedly kidnapping me. He was meant to have put me in the back of his car and taped me up. Then the brown stuff hit the fan in a farcical manner, as a direct result of my mum’s poster campaign.
Michaela is married to Colin’s brother, Ken, and they have a daughter called Louise. There is a similarity between Colin and Ken because they are brothers. There is a third brother Peter, and there is a strong resemblance between all three of the brothers. Anyway, one night before I moved in with Colin, I was upstairs at Michaela’s when Louise and her dad got out of the car and skipped into the house.
Vindictively, my mum called the police and said, ‘I have just seen Hailey and Colin running into this Michaela’s house.’
Next thing, knock, knock, knock, ‘Is Hailey here?’ It was the police.
‘Yes, she is.’
‘Where’s Colin?’ they asked.
Colin’s bail conditions at the time were that he should have no contact with me. So what my mum was saying to the police was that he was in breach of these conditions. Although I would like to make it clear that on that particular night I was not with him, and at any other time, whenever there was any contact between us, it was me who approached him, not the other way around.
What brought all this about was a previous occurrence when I was in Cleethorpes. I’d gone to McDonald’s and met up with Colin’s brother, Peter, who was with his kids, and he wanted to know how I was getting on.
As it happens, Mum’s friend Dawn said she was parked outside McDonald’s and that she saw me getting into a car with a man and driving off. She said I got in the car with Colin. In fact, I had got in the car with Peter.
That was when Colin got arrested. At the time he was staying in a bail hostel in York and it was there, incidentally, that the so-called ‘hard men’ who branded him the ‘paedophile from Hull’ attacked him on two separate occasions. Unbeknown to them, the well-spoken, well-groomed man I had come to know had been brought up in the tough back streets of Hull. The son of a hard-living, hard-working and unbreakable fisherman, Colin was well capable of looking after himself. And, for sure, these hard men ended up being wounded far worse in these confrontations than he was.
As a result of being arrested for this further alleged abduction, the next day Colin had to go to York Magistrates’ Court to face the charge that he had abducted me for a second time. He was unfairly made to look very bad.
Colin and his solicitor were there in court, but the witnesses were not, and this little old magistrate sitting there with her glasses on asked, ‘Where are the witnesses?’ She was told, ‘They are busy at work.’
The argument put to the court on behalf of Colin was that, if the witnesses were sitting behind the car in question, how could they identify him from the back of his head alone? The magistrate said, ‘I am not having a kidnap charge put on him just by identifying somebody by the back of the head. It could have been anybody. We will leave it on file for the next court case. Go back to your bail hostel.’
<
br /> The solicitor said that, because Colin had been arrested while staying at the bail hostel, no other bail hostel in the county would take him. This problem was soon solved when his solicitor told the court that Colin’s family would take him.
‘Whereabouts?’ he was asked.
‘In Hull, he has got his mum’s; he has got his brother’s and sister’s; he has aunts and uncles.’
The magistrate told the solicitor, ‘You pick an address and he can stay there.’
So he did, and all bail restrictions were thrown out. Colin could have his own house again and I was able to live with Colin officially. It was thanks to my mum and Dawn – albeit unwittingly.
Before Colin attended court on the abduction charge, a lot of criticism had been heaped upon him because he appeared in court over a domestic incident with his then wife, Christine. According to Colin, a row between the pair of them flared after she asked Colin to ‘chuck’ her shoe to her. Instead of passing it, he tossed it across the room so she could catch it, but, he told me, it accidentally caught her on the knee. That is how it all started.
Colin’s account was that he said matter-of-factly, ‘Oh, sorry, duck. Are you all right?’ and that Christine replied, ‘Yes, don’t worry about it.’
The resultant graze caused to her knee by the shoe was to set in motion a chain of events that would see Colin’s unblemished record become tarnished. The week after the shoe-throwing accident, Christine’s sister came round to their home and said to Colin, ‘You want to keep your hands to yourself, chucking a shoe at my sister.’
In disbelief, Colin said, ‘What are you on about?’
‘You know, chucking a shoe at my sister,’ she said.
Colin innocently admitted, ‘Yes, I did. She asked me to chuck her a shoe, so I chucked it.’
She replied, ‘Oh! Well, she told me that you got it and you whacked it on her leg.’
Colin ended up going to court because, after he finally split from Christine, he went round to see her one night and took her some shopping. He still took food to her because she had no money.
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 15
