Daughter f lees court as former Pink Floyd It-girl is cleared of child abuse
THE daughter of a Sixties It-girl linked to Pink Floyd ran screaming from a court yesterday as her mother was cleared of more than a decade of cruelty to her and her brother.
Rosa Aguelo de Guero, 42, could be heard shouting ‘No, no, no’ outside after her mother Susan WynneWillson, 69, was found not guilty of all eight charges against her.
Wynne-Willson said yesterday she still loved her daughter, despite being accused by her of punching, kicking, and biting her when she was a child at their £700,000 London mansion flat.
The mother of five was charged with historic child cruelty and assault after her daughter and adopted son, Dan, who is now a deputy headteacher, reported her to police in 2015.
But yesterday jurors at Blackfriars Crown Court in central London took less than three hours to reach their verdict following a three-week trial in which five members of the wealthy family gave wildly contrasting accounts of their life in the 1980s.
Wynne-Willson had been the ‘archetypal hippie chick’, living in London with arty friends including Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, friends said.
She met and married Peter WynneWillson, 71, who created the rock band’s psychedelic light shows, with the couple described as ‘scions of the lower rungs of English aristocracy’.
They enjoyed a privileged life at a stately home in North Yorkshire, but their business went bust and Wynne-Willson split from her husband, taking three of the children back to London.
Over the next 14 years, the court was told that she became increasingly abusive to them, including stuffing soiled underwear into their mouths and wrapping them in urine-soaked bedsheets.
Giving evidence, Miss Aguelo de Guero branded her mother a ‘monster’ and claimed they were so scared of her they tried to kill themselves before they were aged ten by eating coloured beads.
Daniel Wynne-Willson, 40, told the court he was treated ‘like a slave’ by his ‘evil’ mother and had his head held under water to stop him crying when he was still in primary school.
Their father Mr Wynne-Willson, who was also the lighting engineer for U2, told jurors the children tried to do ‘everything they could’ to stop his ‘tyrannical’ ex-wife’s assaults.
But the court also heard from the couple’s eldest daughter Alice Wynne-Willson, 45, a Greenpeace executive, who said that their childhood had been ‘dramatically different’ from her siblings’ account.
The Cambridge graduate said Miss Aguelo de Guero was a one-time crack addict who constantly lied and blamed their parents for her life not turning out to be ‘perfect’.
She claimed her younger sister started to blame her mother for her troubles after reading child abuse survivor blogs and the ‘misery memoir’ A Child Called It and identifying with them.
Giving evidence, Wynne-Willson said she was on ‘the verge of insanity’ at times looking after her children. But although she admitted to being ‘volatile’, she said the claims were ‘beyond commenting on... absolutely ridiculous and extreme’.
She said: ‘These are two of my children that I love dearly and I do not want anything but happiness for them and their children.’
Emma Goodall, defending, pointed to the ‘many inconsistencies’ in the accounts of Miss Aguelo de Guero and her adopted brother. She said: ‘Mrs WynneWillson throughout this trial has admitted her failure as a mother. She was not the calm or stable parent that she should have been. That, she regrets.’
Wynne-Willson held her head in her hands as the jury cleared her yesterday of child cruelty and three counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm between 1979 and 1993.