Why did they let our middle-class daughter be bullied to death?
Less than a month before her release for drink-driving, student Katie Allan took her own life. In a heartbreaking account, her devastated mother asks...
TEN short months. That was how long it took for Linda Allan’s settled world to fragment and shatter, for her happy family life to spiral into unimaginable tragedy.
She remembers the awful culmination; the day in June 2018 when the police arrived at her door. ‘They asked if they could come in, if I was alone. I asked what on earth had happened. They told me my daughter Katie had been found dead.
‘I just screamed in disbelief. I said it couldn’t possibly be true. I said, “How can she be dead. Did someone murder her?” Then they said it was suicide. She had taken her own life. ‘I just kept saying, “That can’t possibly be true.” They had a duty of care. Katie was in prison. Less than a month later she had been due for release.’
How had it come to this? How could Linda, then a senior policy adviser to the Scottish Government, a happily married mother of two, be contemplating the suicide, in prison, of her bright, beautiful daughter?
How had Katie – a Glasgow University undergraduate with a life full of hope and promise ahead of her – found herself behind bars in the first place?
The Allan family’s escalating nightmare began in August 2017 when Katie, then 20, a high-achiever – ‘compassionate and caring with a real social conscience’, says her mum – knocked down and injured a teenage boy, the same age, incidentally, as her younger brother Scott, after drinking four pints of cider.
Katie’s remorse after the crash was matched by her mother’s anger: ‘I was really furious with Katie.
‘She’d been brought up with a fearful respect for the law,’ says Linda. ‘There was disbelief, too.’
Katie was convicted of drinkdriving and dangerous driving in March 2018 and, despite her repentance – and although the victim’s parents had appealed for clemency (their son went on to make a full recovery) – she was sentenced to two years in prison, reduced to 16 months because she had pleaded guilty, although other, non-custodial options were available to the court.
At Polmont Young Offenders Institution in Stirlingshire she was bullied mercilessly, by fellow prisoners and staff alike.
Katie, with her love of books, her Baden Powell award in Girl Guiding, her university education, was set apart by her intelligence, her upbringing, her good behaviour. She was the target of vilification and abuse.
‘She was bullied for being compliant, for saying, “please and thank you”. She was a model prisoner,’ says Linda.
‘After her friends from university visited she was often stripsearched. She was alone in being consistently singled out.
SHE told me she’d been used in a prison officers’ training exercise. She said, “Mum they made me take all my clothes off and left me there while they held a conversation.” She felt really violated.
‘The last time I saw her alive I knew something was terribly wrong. She’d lost 80 per cent of her hair through stress-related alopecia and she looked drugged. Actually she was absolutely exhausted. She hadn’t slept for three nights.
‘I said, “What on earth has happened?” and she burst out crying, which she’d never done before, and it all came tumbling out: the bullying, the namecalling, the berating.
‘She had applied for a home detention curfew and we were counting down the days until her release.
‘But she said she couldn’t take any more. The noise – screaming and abuse – was coming through her cell walls all night.
‘She was crying, all snot and tears, and we weren’t allowed to have tissues so I asked a prison officer if Katie could have something to wipe her face with. She went away and came back with a duster.
‘Before I left that day I spoke to an officer. I burst out crying and said, “I’m petrified about Katie’s safety.” She said, “Don’t worry.” Then I was told to leave.
‘In response to Katie’s distress, she was going to be moved in with the “lifers” on the second floor or with the adult female prisoners on the first floor. Then they locked her up alone (in her original cell) to endure another night of bullying – and she took her own life.
‘She was found at 6am on June 4, 2018. There was a hook in her cell wall and she had hanged herself from it with the cord of her dressing gown. They found numerous self-harm marks on her arms and a razor blade in her cell. How did no one see the marks when they strip-searched her?
‘Why was there a blade in her cell when she hadn’t even been allowed to have water colour paints in case she ate them?’
Linda, 53, is articulate, intelligent; softly spoken, but her anger quietly simmers. An honorary professor at Glasgow University, she seeks answers: she and her husband Stuart, 55, a sales reporting manager, are pursuing a criminal prosecution for corporate manslaughter against the Scottish Prison Service: ‘It is unforgivable she died and what’s even more reprehensible is the cover-up. No one has ever said sorry. Some of the prison officers were evil. They believed prisoners were there to be controlled and bullied. They colluded in Katie’s distress.’
Linda remembers the summer’s day – August 10, 2017 – when the family’s settled life began to unravel. Katie, who rented a student flat in south Glasgow, had a part-time café job while studying for her geography degree. She had been for a drink with colleagues and, says her mother, had no intention of driving.
HOWEVER when the café owner’s daughter asked for a lift home, Katie, who was four times over the legal limit, agreed. ‘This was typical of Katie. She was too kind for her own good,’ says her mother. On the journey Katie hit and injured Michael Keenan, 15, who was out jogging.
‘The first thing she did was write a letter apologising to him and his parents,’ says Linda. ‘She was mortified; full of remorse. There was never any question that she should be punished, but we did not expect a custodial sentence.’
She adds: ‘I had faith in the justice system then. I don’t now. No one in their right mind would think prison would benefit her or society.’
Indeed, Michael Keenan’s family, who have since become friends with the Allans, agreed. His father Gordon, who has worked with ex-offenders, wrote to Paisley Sheriff Court saying, ‘under no circumstances’ did they want Katie to be jailed.
But Katie was sentenced to 16 months: ‘When the sentence was handed down she looked across at me, burst out crying and mouthed, “Mum, help me.” I was shaking and crying. ‘Katie’s solicitor said, “She’s resilient. She’ll be out in time for her next year at uni. She’ll be fine.”’
In fact the family’s tragedy was only just unfold
ing. Linda recalls her daughter’s first phone call home from Polmont. ‘I heard screaming in the background but Katie put on a brave face.
‘She said, “It’s OK mum,” but I knew she was petrified. I was crying, worried sick.’
Linda recalls her first visit, five days after Katie was sentenced, with Stuart and son Scott, then 15; the ‘atmosphere of fear and threat’. She says: ‘We were searched: they put a gloved finger into our mouths in case we were hiding drugs; they pat you down. We were frightened. You’re in a confined space with people boasting about the crimes they’d committed, shouting obscenities. Some were clearly under the influence of drugs.
‘And then we saw Katie. I didn’t recognise her. She was wearing a grey, baggy prison-issue track suit, no make-up and her hair had started to fall out. Her skin was red-raw with stress eczema.’
Linda organised a rota of visits: Katie never went more than three days without one. University friends rallied; her extended family came in shifts. Even her old Girl Guide leaders called, ‘And she was bullied because she had so many visitors,’ says Linda. Her love of books also set her apart. ‘They’d search cells randomly but they targeted her because she had “too many books”. She was forced to give them away to the library. I posted photos of the family, friends; her favourite sunsets, by recorded delivery. She never got them.’
KATIE turned 21 in prison in April 2018. There was no celebration; gifts were forbidden. ‘Some of the girl prisoners clubbed together to buy her a jar of coffee but she was forced to hand it over to an adult female prisoner as payment for plucking her eyebrows. This same adult was supplying drugs to other offenders.
‘The prison staff wanted an excuse to move her – they used her coercion of Katie as a reason – and when she went, Katie was blamed by some offenders for cutting off their drug supply. She was sent the most vile letters from male prisoners (they had mixed education classes) about the most obscene sexual acts they wanted to perform on her. Night after night she was berated. The bullying, the threats were constant…’
Linda will never quite know what pushed her daughter over the edge, but she believes Katie feared she would not even be spared vilification when released: references to her address were made in the loathsome letters she was sent.
‘I’m so sorry it has come to this. I have let you both down, and Scott as a sister. I loved you very much,’ she wrote to her parents and brother, now 17, in a brief final note found in her cell.
Even today Linda feels disbelief. She sits in the neat front room of the family home in Glasgow. Her grief, she says, is ‘a life-long journey’, with no remission.
But a fierce determination fires her. ‘We want the prison service to be held accountable for Katie’s death,’ she says.
‘The hardest thing to accept is how devastatingly she was let down by the people ultimately responsible for her care – and that is utterly unforgivable.’