Bravery beyond belief of the little girl who snared a monster
...as told by the journalist who’s been at her family’s side all these years
RUSSELL Bishop abducted, sexually assaulted and left a seven-year-old girl for dead in Brighton just three years after his acquittal for the Wild Park murders. She survived and gave evidence at his trial in 1990. He was convicted and jailed for life. But Bishop never admitted the crime – until his retrial which ended yesterday. Here her parents reveal the aftermath of that attack on their daughter, now 36, and why, at last, with Bishop’s conviction, they hope they can move on. One morning two weeks ago, the telephone rang at 8am in the neat, semi-detached house where the parents of Russell Bishop’s last victim live.
The call went to answerphone, but as soon as her father heard his daughter’s voice he raced to pick up the receiver, worried in case his daughter, whom we shall call ‘Daisy’, was having ‘one of her bad days’.
She was: she’d just switched on her computer and been unable to avoid the news headlines about Bishop. She was stunned, caught between disbelief and relief.
‘Dad,’ she said, hardly able to get out the words, ‘Dad … Russell Bishop’s finally admitted what he did to me.’
The most extraordinary aspect of Bishop’s retrial and conviction yesterday for the murder of two nine-year-old girls from Brighton in 1986 – the so-called ‘Babes in the Wood’ case – was his unexpected admission that he had, four years later, abducted, assaulted and left for dead Daisy, then seven.
Found guilty of that horrific crime in December 1990 and sentenced to life, he had spent 28 years proclaiming his innocence and saying he’d been framed.
He tried to sue Sussex Police for wrongful imprisonment and regularly applied for parole. But then on november 26, while giving evidence at the Old Bailey, he made that confession – along with an utterly sickening justification – as part of his bizarre defence.
Bishop insisted he was not a paedophile and had only attacked Daisy because of the ‘psychological trauma’ after his acquittal in his first trial for the murder of Karen Hadaway and nicola Fellows. He blamed the ‘hate campaign’ that followed for making him so angry he was driven to ‘ shame and belittle’ Daisy, in ‘ revenge’. He was, he added, ‘ashamed’ of hurting Daisy.
It was a breath-taking, textbook example of paedophile self-pity and victim- blaming – and in loathsome contrast to the extraordinary grace and courage of his victim and her family.
I was the journalist to whom Daisy’s parents gave their only interview just before Christmas in 1990, and I also met and briefly spoke with Daisy. Bishop had been sentenced that day, and I watched as she decorated the bannisters with tinsel. She seemed cheerful and carefree, muttering only that if she ever saw ‘the horrible man again’, she would ‘hit him with a big stick’.
‘ We’ve coped because she’s coped,’ her parents told me then. This week I visited the couple again. Bishop’s ugly, belated confession has shaken them to the core – but it has also freed them and, hopefully, Daisy.
Immediately after reading about Bishop’s confession, Daisy, now 36, made that early morning call to her father, her ‘rock’ to whom she is so close.
A big man who served with the military, he’s gruff of manner but has a kind face and is near to tears as he recounts the conversation.
‘She was a mess,’ he says now. ‘She couldn’t take it in.
‘Bishop and his family have spent decades denying what he did to her, and her memories from when she was seven have naturally – thank God – faded.
‘But it meant that she had gone through a stage where she feared maybe that they were right and she had identified the wrong man. She felt shame and guilt and would run herself down.
‘I had to explain to her: his admission means you were right. And if he hadn’t been convicted because of your evidence, how many other children would he have attacked? You shouldn’t feel guilty. You should feel strong and proud.’
His wife says she never doubted Daisy’s account of what happened and who was responsible.
‘I was with her at the identity parade. no one prompted her and she never hesitated. She knew straight away it was him, it was Bishop. She was just a little kid. She didn’t know his photo from the papers. But she has always been very good at detail, very precise.’
Daisy ‘has her father’s great inner strength’, says her mother. Indeed, when I met her in 1990, a little girl to whom something unimaginably horrible had happened, I was struck by her resilience. Two days after the attack, she went to a friend’s birthday party, wearing a high neck jumper to hide the bruises where he’d tried to strangle her. She told other children she’d had an accident.
My interview was headlined ‘The Bravest Little Girl in Britain’ and she lived up to that. She did well at school, got a job, married and led a normal- seeming life. But doctors warned that jumbled fragments of memories and emotion stemming from what happened might return to haunt her as she grew older, catch her unawares and fell her.
And so it has proved: whenever Bishop’s name has been back in the headlines, whenever he has proclaimed his innocence or whenever the police notified her before each parole hearing, ‘she had a relapse,’ say her parents.
She has, at times, been paralysed by panic and agoraphobia, unable for days on end to open her front door, terrified lest her ‘real’ attacker was still out there.
Throughout it all her sensible parents have been there, determined that through their love and sheer stoicism and her own strength of will, Daisy would weather each setback and recover. But it is clear that every aspect of their lives and their daughter’s has nonetheless been punctuated by pain.
They shrug when I comment on their courage: ‘It was how we were brought up.’ Yet Daisy is the victim who should never have been. If Bishop had been convicted at his first trial in 1987, he would not have been free to abduct her.
She and her family refuse to be drawn into speculation about the reasons for that acquittal. Her mother says only ‘evidence was mishandled’.
‘But what good would it do if we became bitter and twisted? You don’t need a big conspiracy. All it takes is one mistake by one person, for whatever reason, to set something so awful in train.
‘People have said we should be angry and look for compensation. But what is the point?’
Then, with a rare flash of anger, her husband adds: ‘Only one thing would make it better – if the police bloody got [Bishop] in the first place.’ Both pensioners now, they live modestly, have an old car and a tiny garden. Like Daisy, they have been offered huge sums by the media and film-makers to tell their story. But their privacy matters far more. ‘Why become public property?’
They received no payment for this interview, did not request one and asked only one thing: that not a single detail identifies Daisy.
We talk in their galley kitchen
‘Two days after the attack she went to a party’
where Daisy’s mum makes coffee, and distracts herself by tidying the worktops. When I ask a question she doesn’t want to answer – in case, she admits, it might identify her daughter – she steadily meets my gaze and says nothing.
Daisy rings twice as we speak, anxious to know what we are discussing. It is clear her parents are giving this interview only to deflect fire from Daisy, who has never spoken. They are still protecting her: their grown daughter will always be the little girl they nearly lost.
Daisy, a slight, strikingly pretty child was happily roller- skating just outside her home, which was then in Brighton, when Russell Bishop kidnapped her on February 4, 1990. Police believe he had previously ‘talent- spotted’ her, rather than taken her on impulse.
It was an unseasonably warm, sunny Sunday afternoon and the street was busy. Men were working on their cars or in their gardens and children played. It was a closeknit, built-up area, and should have been safe. But Bishop swooped with swift, practised silence, a hand over her mouth so she could not scream, and bundled her, still wearing her skates, into the boot of a red Cortina he’d stolen earlier.
No one realised what had happened. Some believe Bishop conducted this clearly pre-meditated kidnap so brazenly because he believed himself immune. Just days before, Sussex Police had issued a press statement implying that the force was effectively closing its investigations into the unsolved murder four years earlier of the ‘Babes in the Woods’.
‘He thought he’d got away with it and could celebrate,’ a former police officer told me later.
And so Bishop drove 14 miles to the Devil’s Dyke beauty spot high on the South Downs, where he strangled Daisy, sexually molested her after she lost consciousness and left her for dead in the middle of gorse bushes.
Miraculously, after 20 minutes or so she came to. It was by now dark but the bruised, bleeding child managed to push her way through the undergrowth to a road. She was found by a couple – she later described them as ‘the good people’. They called an ambulance which took her to hospital.
‘She calmly gave the hospital all her details – her name, address, date of birth, phone number,’ her mother says. ‘The most difficult part was when I saw her at the hospital – they couldn’t examine her until I got there, and I couldn’t get upset because it would upset her. But she wasn’t crying. She said, “Look Mummy, I’m colouring in Rupert Bear.”’
She was upset that she’d lost her new jumper – worn for the first time that day – and thought her she’d be in trouble. ‘We can always buy a new jumper. We can’t buy a new you,’ her mother told her.
Mercifully, Daisy was shielded by amnesia from the worst of what happened. In her own account at the time which she’d insisted on writing – ‘The Day I went Missing’ – she says she fell into a ‘deep, deep sleep’. She had been strangled so violently for so long that doctors were amazed she survived without brain damage. She could remember being kidnapped and Bishop opening his car boot on the Downs. Everything after that was a blank.
‘The night she came home, she didn’t want to sleep because she was frightened of forgetting. She woke up and told me a couple of things that came to mind – like the can of WD40 that Bishop had in the boot of his car – “like you’ve got in your car, Mummy”.’
She returned to school a few days later, and ‘the teachers were absolutely terrific. They listened if ever she needed to talk, and taught the other children not to pry.’
Amazingly, few people ever learned she was Bishop’s victim.
‘She was always alert. She has great awareness,’ her mother says. ‘ When Daisy did the identity parade, she said afterwards: “He looked different – he’s changed his hair.” It wasn’t until later in court that we learned that he wetted his hair, to make it look darker.’
Bishop was arrested but denied everything so little Daisy was forced to face cross- examination at Lewes Crown Court.
‘The police wanted her to testify. We didn’t want her to appear, even to give video evidence,’ her mother says. ‘She mulled it over in her mind for a few days. Her main question was – “Will I see the horrible man? And will he see me?”’
It was Daisy who made the decision to appear in the end – from behind a screen. She described being hunched up in Bishop’s boot but studying everything so she could tell the police later: she had already decided she would survive.
With enormous prescience, and despite being in the dark, she made scratches on the inside of the boot and memorised their number, shape and position. This was to help police identify his car.
When she gave evidence you could hear a pin drop. Some were near tears as she described struggling to get off her roller skates because ‘I knew if I could get my boots off, I could do a runner when he opened the boot’.
The defence tried to portray her as a little girl so traumatised she couldn’t be believed, but the jury was convinced. Today, Daisy’s parents still do not know exactly what she remembers. ‘We’ve never gone into it in depth with her – she doesn’t want us to. As soon as anyone mentions it, the feelings come up again. You live with it all the time – but why talk about it?’
Daisy briefly received therapy at a specialist children’s unit, but stopped of her own accord. She has only just told her current GP about her ordeal because she has suffering from stress during Bishop’s retrial. All her parents have ever wanted was for her to feel safe again, and the low-key way they refer to Daisy’s kidnap as “the incident” underlines how they have been determined it would not rule her life.
‘Daisy is a tough cookie, but we know now how much it affected her,’ her mother says.
Her father interrupts sorrowfully: ‘Inside sometimes she’s like jelly. She suddenly has relapses. Just the words “Russell Bishop” can bring it back. She can come across as brusque but she needs her protective shell. Her husband is very calm and that helps. He knows her background but neighbours, colleagues and even most friends don’t. We’re all private people but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel it. Just that pity and gossip don’t help anyone.’
Keeping her secret has helped Daisy to heal but ‘it also stops you from getting close to people. You’re always wary’, says her mother.
Bishop and his family waged a long campaign for his release. His uncle, the late Michael Dawes, a millionaire Brighton antique dealer, and his mother Sylvia Bishop, a well-known dog trainer, helped fund private investigators, public meetings and even a book, A Question of Evidence, allegedly part financed indirectly by Dawes, blaming other individuals for his deeds.
The fear Bishop would be released, or that she identified the wrong man and her ‘real’ attacker was still free, have long haunted Daisy.
‘She has had to struggle against becoming a prisoner of her own home. There were times, on and off, when she wouldn’t go out of her front door. That is what Bishop’s denial did to her. It has affected every area of our lives.’
Her mother says she sometimes worries whether the family’s ‘stiff upper lip’ approach has helped or hindered their daughter. ‘On our death beds, will she turn round and say: “You did it wrong?” Maybe, we will only know then. There is no guidebook for getting through something like this.’
They have recently learned about a relatively new form of psychotherapy, EMDR (eye movement desensitisation reprocessing), which helps war veterans and abuse survivors to switch off flashbacks and calm themselves through a pattern of taps and eye movements, and wonder whether it might help Daisy. They agree that touch can be more comforting than talk.
A family gathering is planned the day after we meet, and Daisy has ‘booked a four-minute cuddle’ with her dad. ‘That’s her way of saying she feels fragile,’ he says.
Daisy’s mother is not conventionally religious but as I take my leave she looks heavenward and says. ‘[God] throws things at you. Good and bad. To see how you’ll cope and maybe even to make you strong’. She believes Daisy ‘was put here for a reason – because she should have been dead. Someone was looking out for her that day’. Daisy’s own motto is ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you strong’.
Now, the couple hope Bishop’s belated confession will finally give their daughter the inner peace – and pride in herself – she deserves.
Her father says: ‘I just wish they’d got him in the first place. The verdict is what we expected. Now, let’s hope everybody now can be at peace and that it’s over.
‘I’ll say it again. She did a great thing. If she hadn’t sent him to prison, how many more children would he have hurt? Who knows how many children she saved?’
‘HELPING’ POLICE HUNT HIS OWN VICTIMS ‘Who knows how many children she saved?’ ‘If I could get my skates off I could do a runner’