ARTIST JOSIE SET TO MARRY
ARTIST Josie Russell, who survived a brutal attack that killed her mother and sister more than 20 years ago, is to get married.
The 30-year-old from the Nantlle Valley, whose mother Lin and sixyear-old sister Megan died in the attack, wants to start a family with fiancé Iwan Griffith.
The 31-year-old fire alarm engineer, whom she met in a Caernarfon pub in 2005, proposed last December, but Ms Russell has waited until now to share the news of their engagement.
She said: “It was on Christmas morning. Iwan gave me chocolates and said: ‘Sorry, I didn’t get you much.’ Then he produced the ring – a diamond solitaire – and said: ‘Happy Christmas.’
“He did offer to get down on one knee and propose but I told him he didn’t have to. It was a wonderful moment because Iwan is not only a wonderful man, he’s my best friend.”
Ms Russell, who was brought up at Talysarn near Penygroes, was just nine when Michael Stone attacked the trio in July 1996 as they walked along a country lane in Kent where they had moved to live.
The brutality of the attack, in which Lin, 45, and Megan died alongside their pet dog, shocked the world.
Ms Russell suffered head injuries in the attack which were so catastrophic that she was initially presumed to have been killed.
But paramedics found a pulse and she was rushed to hospital where she began a long but remarkable period of rehabilitation, managing to speak again after a year.
After months of hospital treatment, her father Shaun, an university professor, brought her back to Gwynedd.
She has since became a successful textile artist and met Iwan 12 years ago, when he had no knowledge of the murders.
“He asked about my mum once and I just told him she had died,” said Ms Russell.
“Later his parents told him the full story but we never talk about the past. It’s better for me to just get on with the present.”