A mothers’ bond forged in rage and grief
They formed a unique friendship after their daughters were murdered by ex-boyfriends. Now, with heartbreaking courage, they describe their joint struggle for true justice
THE friendship between Carole Gould and Julie Devey began just a year ago, but they knew from the very start it would be invincible. The reason? They are united by tragedies as harrowing as they are unthinkable. Their only daughters — both bright, beautiful young women with lives full of hope and promise — were murdered in the sanctuary of their own homes, by their ex-boyfriends.
Two months after splitting up with fellow graduate Joe Atkinson, 25, P oppy Devey Waterhouse, 24, a gifted mathematician with a first- class degree, was murdered by him in the flat they still shared in Leeds.
She suffered almost 100 injuries, including 49 knife wounds to her head and neck in the December 2018 attack.
Five months later, Ellie Gould, 17, a teen - ager with a dazzling smile, poised to begin the great adventure of university life, was stabbed at least 13 times in the face and neck by Thomas Griffiths, 17, after he’d tried to throttle her as she revised for her A -levels.
The night before, she had ended a three - month relationship with him. Both attacks, by young men who had been welcomed into their victims’ family homes, were frenzied, inexplicable and harrowing.
For Carole, 50, life as she knew it is ‘utterly destroyed’. Julie, 57, says: ‘Half of me died with Poppy.’ only mothers who have endured such loss can grasp its awful scope and scale. Julie and Carole cry together; they reminisce, they share experiences.
They understand every nuance of each oth - er’s grief, regret and anger. When they first met, in February last year, they fell into each other’s arms. ‘We hugged and cried,’ recalls Julie.
‘I think it was a relief,’ says Carole. As‘ much as I have friends who support me, I don ’t want to drag them down by talking about Ellie all the time. Y ou’re conscious that they’re struggling with her death, too. But then I met Julie and we both wanted to talk about our girls. Y ou’re in this club no one wants to belong to, that you never imagine you’ll be part of, of mothers whose children have been murdered. If we got upset, we were in it together. We understood. We could cry, scream and shout together.’
It was Julie who first wrote to Carole, who knew instantly who Julie was. She had read all about Poppy’s death and was ‘horrified’ by the short minimum jail time — just over 16 years — her killer had been given.
‘It was surreal,’ Carole says, ‘We’d just heard from our barrister that Griffiths would only get 12-and-a-half years for Ellie’s murder and we were in utter disbelief at the leniency of the sentence.
‘I couldn’t accept it. I’d been poring over Poppy’s case and I thought, “Her mother will understand immediately what we’re going through”. And then Julie contacted me, and of course she did understand.’
The women are united, not only by the shared horror, but also by a campaign to get tougher sentences for perpetrators of what is often described as ‘domestic homicide’.
Because neither Griffiths nor Atkinson took weapons with them, but got them from the kitchen of their vic - tims’ homes, their crimes are not regarded as pre -meditated and, under current law , warrant lesser jail terms.
‘The savagery and violence of the attacks seem to count for nothing in the eyes of the law and this is infuri - ating,’ says Julie. ‘Campaigning for a change in the law is what drives us.’
The women, articulate, thoughtful, first met at Carole’s house in Calne, Wiltshire on February 1, 2019.
Julie lives just 25 miles away in Frome, Somerset. ‘There was no preamble, no small talk ,’ says Julie. ‘We started to talk immediately about Ellie and P oppy, our girls. Y ou’re going straight into an intimate and emotional relationship. The connec - tion was instantaneous.
‘I knew exactly what had happened to Ellie. Carole and I looked at each other knowing we were both mothers of amazing young women who had been murdered by young men we did not know were capable of violence, let alone of such sustained and horrific attacks.’
What happened to Ellie and Poppy is beyond imagining . Julie, a deputy registrar, recalls how she had just officiated at a wedding when police called at her office in Bath.
‘They said paramedics had been called to P oppy’s flat, that they couldn’t do anything to save her; that there had been a stab wound and Joe Atkinson had been arrested.
‘You struggle to make sense of it. I thought there must have been some horrific accident. Later a police - woman said the words “multiple stab wounds” and I remember gulping in air, struggling to breathe. At this point I knew this was something Atkinson had decided to do.’
CAROLE, listening on our three-way Zoom call, puts her head in her hands and cries. ‘I sank to the floor screaming , “No, no, no . . .”’, continues Julie. ‘I kept pawing at the carpet as if I could escape the information the police - woman was giving me. I just wanted to melt away, for her to go away.’
It fell to Julie to tell P oppy’s dad rupert, 59, an antique dealer’s assistant — from whom she separated a couple of years earlier — that their daughter was dead.
And then there was Zeb, now 24, their son. He, too, had to hear that his sister had been murdered.
In May the following year, a similar waking nightmare was unfolding at the Goulds’ home.
Carole’s husband Matt, 53, with whom she runs a business, came home from work early to find Ellie lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen. In the blur of panic and confusion, Matt did not at first realise she was dead. He phoned Carole at work . She recalls the rising hysteria in his voice as he screamed, ‘Ellie’s had an accident. Come home!’ ‘I don ’t know how I drove back,’ Carole recalls. ‘All I could think during the journey was that perhaps Ellie had slipped and fallen.’
Carole remembers police swarming round the house, Matt crying, ‘She’s dead!’ and then, sharing Julie’s sense that this horror could not possibly be real: ‘I felt numbness, utter disbelief.
‘Like Julie, I have a son, Ben, who is 21. He had to be told the news. Even now you feel you’re acting a part in a drama. You’re thinking: “This cannot be happening to us. It ’s not our world. What has happened to our contented, happy lives?”’
Their worlds were, indeed, blessed before tragedy intervened. Ellie, who planned to study psychology at university and hoped to become a police officer, was talented and caring ,a gifted and ‘fearless’ horsewoman who loved animals.
Until she went out with Grif - fiths, a fellow pupil at ‘ high-performing’ Hardenhuish School, Chippenham, she was more interested in riding her pony than going out with boys.
ELLIE also cared about justice and fairness, says her mum: ‘She had just gained an A grade for an extended essay about juvenile murderers and the age of criminal responsibility . When I think about it, it sends shivers up my spine.
‘She would have wanted Griffiths to be properly pun - ished. Julie and I are doing this for our girls, but also because we’re frustrated by a system that has allowed two young men who have committed such terrible crimes to be treated so leniently . The weight of grief never lifts and it is made worse by the lack of respect the justice system has for our daughters’ lives.’
Carole describes Griffiths, who grew up in a loving home with sup - portive parents, as ‘an evil psycho - path; a danger to society, particularly to women’.
on the day of Ellie’s murder he took a bus home early from school and hid in a wardrobe until his mother ,a school’s special educational needs co-ordinator, had left for work.
Then, although he had not passed his driving test, he drove in a car his parents had bought him to the Goulds’ home.
Ellie had ended their relationship the day before because she found Griffiths ‘suffocating’. Within an hour of going to her house he had left again, having murdered her before placing her hand on the handle of the knife to suggest she had stabbed herself. He then returned to school as if nothing had happened.
Carole recalls that she and Matthew had invited Griffiths to tea at their home on Ellie’s 17th birthday . Julie had known Atkinson for longer.
But during P oppy’s three - year relationship with him she had no inkling of the monster he became. ‘He was quite charming and easy-going,’ she recalls. ‘You told me he was clinging,’ prompts Carole.
‘Yes, he was always trying to get Poppy’s attention,’ agrees Julie.
Poppy and Atkinson had met at Nottingham University where both had excelled, achieving top honours in maths. A golden couple, they’d travelled the world before P oppy became a quantitative trading analyst with bookmakers William Hill — Poppy had been the only candidate to get full marks in the entrance test — and they set up home in Leeds.
She ended the relationship in october 2018. ‘She just wasn ’t feeling it any more,’ she’d told Julie — and had been due to move into a new flat three days after the killing. She and Atkinson were sleeping in separate rooms.
Atkinson, unable to cope with the split, returned from a work party in the early hours and attacked P oppy with a knife taken from their kitchen
as she slept. Paramedics and police found a bloodbath, Poppy’s footprints trailing from the bedroom to where she collapsed.
Atkinson, like Griffiths, lied to the police. While Griffiths said Ellie had tried to take her own life — which worsened Carole’s grief — Atkinson falsely claimed he had acted in self-defence, that he and Poppy had rowed and she had been ‘aggressive’.
Neither man has explained the savagery, the ferocity, of his actions. And to Julie and Carole it is unbearable that their sentences should be so light.
Legislation, introduced in 2010, set the minimum term for murder at 25 years for an offender aged 18 or above, who brought a weapon to the scene — although this may be increased or reduced depending on aggravating or mitigating factors. For under-18s like Griffiths, who do not go equipped with a weapon, the tariff is set at a minimum of 12 years.
Carole and Julie believe that these sentences should be tougher. ‘If someone like Griffiths is just five months short of their 18th birthday, the minimum jail term should increase proportionately. He should have got 14- and- a- half years,’ Carole says.
‘And how can it be right that someone who stabs a stranger in a park with a knife they’ve brought with them gets ten years more than Atkinson and Griffiths who committed continued and sustained violence, who acted so barbarically, towards people they purported to love?’ says Julie.
‘It is insulting. It’s sending out the message: “Our girls’ lives are worth ten years less.” There is a term, “overkill”. Both these young men caused far more injuries than they needed to kill our girls. And both of them knew there were knives in the kitchen, so why would they need to bring them to the house?’ she asks.
Poppy, recalls her mum, was an exceptional young woman, who’d learnt to read well before she went to school, who passed her SATs with full marks, a year early.
‘To this day I couldn’t be more proud of her,’ says Julie.
‘In her school yearbook after she’d sat her GCSEs, she was labelled the student “most likely to change the world”.’
She, like Ellie, was also kind and caring; intent on giving something back. While Ellie’s favourite charity was Riding For The Disabled, a cause Carole still supports in her name, Poppy set up a fundraising committee at work, and her family has since raised £ 40,000 for charities, in her memory.
‘I find it very hard to put into words what I feel about Atkinson,’ says Julie. ‘It is beyond hate, something more visceral: the utter disbelief that we knew him; had a relationship with him . . . ’
SHE and Carole are composed, thoughtful, but tears are always near the surface and their quiet anger simmers. ‘ We think about what might have been. Ellie used to talk about her future . . . this monster has taken it all away,’ says Carole. ‘ The most difficult times are the milestones. She would have been 19 in February and that anniversary will be awful.’
The final goodbye in the mortuary to their beloved girls was hardest of all. ‘We told Ellie we missed her and loved her and then you just walk away in bits,’ says Carole. ‘All I have left of my precious daughter is a box of ashes and a lock of her hair.’ Julie went five times to see her daughter. ‘I’d hold her hand tightly, warming it up, willing her, telling her, to “Wake up, wake up Poppy”. But, of course, she never will.’ Julie, too, keeps a lock of her daughter’s hair in a box by her bed: ‘I kiss it before I go to sleep and as soon as I wake up. Each time I tell her I love her so, so much,’ she says.
The mothers’ friendship — forged out of tragedy — will, they agree, endure. ‘Carole is always there, a driving force, moving our campaign forward,’ says Julie.
‘She’s a real rock. We’re not embarrassed to cry together. We’re not scared to bring up topics — like injuries and pathologists’ reports — that would shock other friends. I think we do need to talk about those things.’
‘People should know that what happened to our girls was horrific,’ says Carole. ‘Knowing that Poppy suffered as Ellie did, drives me as well.’ Her eyes brim with tears.
‘It gives me strength, too, to know that Julie is with me, that I’m not battling on my own.’