Bigamist who phoned first wife every day jailed for eight months
A BIGAMIST who set himself up with a new wife and children but continued to call his first wife every day for 17 years has been jailed for eight months.
Neil Rattue, 60, met his first wife Susan in 1980 and they married three years later, buying a home together which he said they had to sell and move in with her mother in Downton, Wiltshire, because they were £67,500 in debt.
Rattue, who often worked away from home, met his second wife Rebecca in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The couple married in 1998 after Rattue forged a divorce certificate. They lived in York and had two children. Though he stopped seeing Susan in 2001, he told her their debts meant they had to stay married.
He called her daily for 17 years to ask how she was and to discuss their finances.
A court previously heard Susan had paid off £30,000 of the debts, from credit cards and loans taken out with Rattue, but still had a “staggering” £37,500 to pay.
Rattue, of York, admitted bigamy at a hearing at Salisbury magistrates court last month. Yesterday a victim statement from Susan Rattue was read out at Salisbury Crown Court.
In it, she said: “Why did he not ask me years ago for a divorce or when he met his new wife? Instead he was leading a double life.
“I am paying for this both mentally and emotionally. I could have remarried and moved on.
“I could have had children. It hurt me to learn he has gone on to have children of his own.
“He still made me pay off all the money. He left and stole my life from me.”
Sentencing him yesterday, Judge Richard Parkes said Rattue had acted in a cowardly and deceitful way.
MOIRA HARRIS, 82, speaks softly as she looks through the window of the countryside cottage outside Macclesfield in Cheshire, that she shares with second husband Andy, an 85-year-old retired GP. “I worry about David all the time,” she says. “He is my son and he is going to be 54 next birthday but I am still worrying.”
“Who will know what drugs he needs to take if I’m not here? Who will check daily that he is all right and taking his meds? Who will be monitoring his mental state? I’ve seen others in his situation who have no family member to care for them. They fall by the wayside.”
David, Moira’s middle child by her first husband, was diagnosed with mental illness 30 years ago. Like many parents in a mental health system that everyone involved accepts lacks resources (it accounts for just 11 per cent of NHS spending), this dignified, determined mother has learnt to be a fighter over the years in getting him the care he needs – but is mindful she won’t be around to fight for him for ever.
She says: “I have a diary that I’ve kept through the years. I went through it yesterday to remind myself. I wished I hadn’t.”
A promising actress in her youth – she trained at Lamda, worked with Sam Wanamaker and got her big-break when director Tony Richardson chose her for a part in 1961’s A Taste Of Honey – Moira gave up her career after her divorce to raise her children alone.
David was top of his class and good at sport until he was 13, she recalls. He then flunked his O-levels and developed an eating disorder. As he entered his 20s one crisis followed another and his behaviour grew more erratic. In 1985 he was spotted walking down the middle of the M56.
“He wanted to get to Manchester Airport because he thought there was a computer there causing the voices in his head,” says Moira. “I was called to the police station where he was quite literally throwing himself against the walls.”
Since he was diagnosed at 25 in 1989 there have been periods of calm and good health where he has lived in supported housing. But there have also been repeated crises when he requires inpatient care.
“Sometimes I think about what he might have been,” reflects Moira. Her other two children have busy careers and families of their own. “He’s never had a job. I’ve mourned him for years that he wouldn’t reach his potential.”
Her latest battle on David’s behalf is over the fate of the Millbrook Unit, a specialist inpatient mental health facility on the campus of Macclesfield District General Hospital. She says: “David absolutely depends on it. His illness means he needs things to be familiar and Millbrook is familiar. Now they want to take that security away from him.”
It is the last such facility in east Cheshire but under threat of closure as part of a variety of options out for public consultation on a “redesign” of services provided by the Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CWP).
National statistics show that over the past three years the number of inpatient mental health beds in England has dropped by about five per cent to 18,282. In the same period CWP’s provision has fallen at almost double that rate from 290 to 269. And its bed occupancy – at 92.6 per cent on the latest figures – is well above the 85 per cent average that it considered good practice.
Which makes Moira all the more puzzled at the suggestion being made that any loss of beds at Millbrook could be absorbed by two other CWP facilities on the west side of the county. Her biggest worry, though, is that the likely outcome of the consultation process will mean an 80-mile round trip for her to visit David when he needs inpatient care instead of the current short drive from her cottage into central Macclesfield.
Peter Hayes, a former chairman of the East Cheshire NHS Trust, has criticised the plans, pointing out that “moving people 40 miles away from their home town smacks a bit of the old-style asylum”.
The proposed reorganisation comes against the backdrop of the government’s Five-Year Forward View For PROMISING: Moira as an actress