Wealthy mum ‘was monster who bit, beat and kicked her children for 14 years’
A WEALTHY grandmother was a ‘ monster’ who violently abused three of her children for 14 years, her adult daughter told a court yesterday.
Susan Wynne-Willson would stuff underwear into their mouths to stop them screaming as she kicked, punched, and bit them at their £700,000 mansion flat, the jury heard.
Wynne-Willson, 69, is charged with historic child cruelty after two of her children accused her of physical violence and bullying from 1979 to 1993.
Holding back tears in a police interview shown to jurors, her daughter Rosa Aguelo de Guero accused Wynne-Willson of being on a ‘ complete mission to destroy us’.
The mother- of- one, whose father Peter Wynne-Willson, 71, is a renowned lighting engineer for Pink Floyd, said: ‘She was a monster. She wasn’t a mother. Who does that?’ Miss Aguelo de Guero’s adopted brother, Daniel Wynne-Willson, 40, is due to give evidence against their mother later in the trial.
To the outside world, they appeared to do everything an ‘upper-middle-class family would do’, she said – including horse riding, saxophone lessons, and visits to National Trust cottages at the weekend. But she said ‘ everything was
‘I felt very unsafe’
hidden behind this facade’, and she claimed her siblings were so traumatised that she found them trying to kill themselves by swallowing coloured beads.
Now aged 42, she told Blackfriars Crown Court in central London how the attacks started shortly before her parents split up and the family left what had been an idyllic life in their North Yorkshire mansion, where they owned two horses.
Miss Aguelo de Guero said her mother had become bored and isolated at the ‘stately home’ in Barnby, near Whitby.
She added: ‘ She started to behave really strangely and I felt very unsafe.’
It was during this period she was first attacked when her mother found out she planned to run away, she said.
She described how Wynne-Willson flung her around and slapped her face in a ‘complete onslaught’.
Miss Aguelo de Guero, Daniel, their sister Poppy, now 41, and their mother went to London, leaving their father and older sister Alice, now 45, who is managing editor at Greenpeace.
It was as they left Yorkshire in the removal van, she said, that ‘something really strange’ came over her in which she realised her life would never the same again.
They moved to a ‘ filthy’ squat owned by her father in Covent Gar- den, central London, where he had once lived with the late Pink Floyd singer Syd Barrett.
She said Wynne-Willson would lie on a mattress and force the three children to form a line so that she could hit them.
Over the next decade, she claimed her mother’s abuse worsened as ‘things just got sicker and sicker’, including daily beatings and being wrapped in soiled bedsheets.
Miss Aguelo de Guero said her mother once left her and Poppy needing hospital treatment after throwing a toy elephant at them.
They later moved to a £ 700,000 mansion flat in Gospel Oak, north west London, also owned by Mr Wynne-Willson, where their life was ‘ complete chaos’ and they were abused daily.
Miss Aguelo de Guero alleged that she was forced to clean the house constantly, leaving her hands raw from exposure to bleach, and Wynne-Willson would bash her head against the toilet bowl.
She claimed her mother would wrap her siblings in wet bed sheets and bite them so deeply it would draw blood.
The children tried to alert neighbours by screaming and banging on the walls, but Wynne-Willson stuffed their mouths. To stop them speaking out about the alleged abuse, she said her mother threatened to kill them in their sleep.
Under cross- examination, she told the court she would have rather have lived in ‘a caravan in Skegness, eating white bread’ than have had all the privileges of her upper-middle- class childhood if it meant avoiding all the abuse she had suffered.
Miss Aguelo de Guero, who changed her name from Rosie Wynne-Willson
‘Things just got sicker and sicker’
by deed poll to her maternal grandfather’s surname, along with her sister Poppy, admitted that she had maintained a relationship with her mother after she left home at 14, and didn’t cut ties with her until three years ago.
She even returned to live with Wynne-Willson when she had her daughter Montana, now 19, and let her mother look after her alone.
Wynne-Willson denies five counts of child cruelty and three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The trial continues.