My girl’s wedding day cancer lies
She forged her GCSE results when she was 16, pretended she had cancer to con her bosses out of £15,000 and even wore a bandana over her shaved head to fool her partner on their wedding day. My daughter is just a...
IT should be 24 hours filled with joy, but this will be a sickening Mother’s Day for Dee Waddington.
And she’ll always remember this one as the day she finally turned her back on the daughter from hell.
The daughter who chillingly confessed in court last week to conning her workmates out of thousands of pounds – by pretending she was dying of cancer.
Twisted Kelsey Whitehead, 38, shaved her head, wore make-up to appear tired and cut her own chest open to insert a fake chemotherapy tube.
She even fooled her distraught wife-to-be – and got married wearing a bandana to cover her ‘hair loss’.
Had her cruel con been a cry for help, her mum might have found it in her broken heart to forgive her daughter.
But today – as Whitehead starts a yearlong suspended sentence – Dee, 61, and her other daughter, Vikki, 35, lift the lid on her lifetime of wicked lies and deceit.
They claim the mum-of-one began lying when she was just nine. They say she faked exam results and qualifications, lied about having a second child and even told pals her family had been killed in a car crash.
She also made foul accusations against another family member.
And perhaps most devastatingly for Dee, Whitehead kept secret the birth of a son who was later adopted, denying her mum the chance to ever meet her first grandchild.
Fighting back tears, Dee says: “I love my daughter. I’ll always feel a mother’s love for her, but I’m ashamed of her behaviour. Now I have no choice but to turn away from her.
Betrayed
“I’ve offered to get help for her over and over, but she’s refused. I feel so sorry for the people who believed she had cancer. They must feel very betrayed and hurt. Kelsey has gone too far. It’s painful to let go but I’ve no choice.
“The child I had is gone. This woman is a stranger to me.”
In her sick scam, Whitehead said she had cancer in a Facebook post and duped her bosses at Carbon Electric in Hull into thinking she needed private t reatment. Convinced by her lies, they loaned her £5,000 and paid her almost £10,000 in sick pay.
She was so plausible, her wife gave up her job to care for her.
Meanwhile, the fraudster kept Dee and Vikki at arm’s length, making excuses not to see them for fear they would recognise her lying behaviour.
The hoax only came to light last May when her wife found a spare phone Whitehead had been using to keep up her lie. She confessed all to police and contacted her mum who lived 60 miles away to cough up to another secret – that she was married.
Dee says: “I knew straight away she had kept me away from the wedding because of the way she looked on the day. She has lied to me before about being ill so I’d have s uspected straight away.”
The court heard how Whitehead even bought a Hickman line catheter from the in internet which she inserted into her chest af after cutting herself. Whitehead’s lawyer sa said her long history of lying stemmed from her childhood. For Dee, her daughter’s shaming has come partly as a relief. “It means the truth is out and she can’t cause any more damage. That’s why I’m speaking out - I don’t want her to cause any more.” She traces her daughter’s lies back to the age of nine. Until then, she says, Kelsey had been a cheerful little girl “adored by everyone”. At first she told white lies, but Dee felt sure she would grow out of it. When Kelsey – born Kelly – reached her teens, her family saw a darker side. Dee says the first serious alleged lie came when Kelsey started sixth form college and she discovered her daughter had faked the As and Bs on her GCSE results.
“She got into college to do her A levels on the back of getting great results,” says Dee. “But she started to really struggle. One of her teachers did some investigating and told me her result papers had been forged.”
Dee quizzed Kelsey in what was to be the first of many confrontations which left her exhausted, searching for an answer to her daughter’s lies.
“She couldn’t tell me why she’d done it,” says Dee. “She just said she was struggling with the work. I’ve asked countless times why she lies but she has never given me an answer. She either denies it or just apologises.”
Despite being caught out over her exams, Kelsey’s lies, says Dee, only grew bigger. After landing a Saturday job at Tesco, Whitehead is said to have convinced staff she had a desperately ill son, but he never existed. Dee claims: “I only found out because someone from Tesco came round to see her and wondered why there were no longer pictures of her son on the walls.
“Kelsey used to babysit a little boy next door to us and I suspect she had shown them pictures of him.”
Dee claims that after a family holiday to Crete, Kelsey, by now 17, told friends she’d met abroad her mum and sister had been killed in a car crash on the way back from the airport.
She was a lovely little girl, but now the child I had is gone
Exposed
“One of the friends called the house and almost fainted when I answered,” says Dee.
After this lie was exposed, Kelsey fled the family home. “I think she realised she had nowhere to turn. She stormed out with some things. I thought she’d cool off and come back but she never did,” says her mum.
Whitehead’s sudden departure sparked years of distress and worry for Dee and her sister Vikki, just 13 at the time. “I tried
desperately to find her,” says administrator Dee who lives in York. “I knew she was out there, most likely telling more lies, and I wanted to help her.
“I’d heard she’d managed to get herself into a children’s home in Leeds, claiming she was still 15. We searched for her, but there was no trace.”
In 2003, Dee – who is divorced from the girls’ father – finally got news of her daughter – but the price was an unbearable betrayal.
Social services visited the family home to tell them Kelsey had a young son who was going to be adopted. Dee says: “It was my first grandchild and I knew nothing about him. I felt robbed. I’m not sure I can ever forgive her for that.
“We went to the family courts to try to fight for him but we had to withdraw because Kelsey didn’t want him to have anything to do with us.
“We’ve no idea why this was. We did nothing wrong. Each year his adoptive parents would write to let us know how he was getting on. It was an annual reminder that I had a grandson who barely knew I existed.”
In a last throw of the dice, Dee once again confronted her daughter, offering to get her help for her pathological lying.
“I told her I’d do anything. I’d fix up for her to see a counsellor or specialist, but she didn’t want it. Then she just vanished again.
“There were times Vikki and I would find her on social media and I’d send her a message, asking her to speak to me, but she’d change her user name and disappear again.
“We’d find out where she was living then she’d move. All the while I just wanted to know she was OK. When she did turn up it was because she was in trouble.
“I would have welcomed her back with open arms because she was my daughter. She promised she’d change and would always apologise for causing so much hurt but then she’d do it again.” In 2011, Vikki heard from friends her sister had set up a charity called Rainbow Rhythms to provide DIY ultrasound machines for women worried about their pregnancy due to previous miscarriages. On the web page, Whitehead, of Gainsborough, Lincs, claims to have lost four babies – but her lying past has left the family sceptical. Vikki says: “We don’t even know if that’s true. The problem is Kelsey is so utterly convincing. When she was caught out lying about cancer I spoke to her wife. “She said Kelsey had told her she had a son called Nathan. But her wife was becoming suspicious about Kelsey’s cancer and asked to speak to Nathan who then started sending her texts. “But when Kelsey was rushed to hospital her wife found a spare phone that had texts from ‘Nathan’ on it. “I think Kelsey had been pretending to be this boy. Her wife also said Kelsey kept her medicine under lock and key. When she found the key to the box it was full of vitamin pills and not cancer medication.
“She said she was leaving Kelsey, but they are back together. I guess she’s been sucked back into her web of lies.”
While Vikki has never longed for a relationship with her sister – now on a 20-week night time curfew and undergoing rehabilitation – Dee has always hoped she would change. Until now.
She says: “I don’t know this person called Kelsey. My daughter was born Kelly and she was a lovely little girl.
“But it’s the end of the line and it breaks my heart.”
Kelsey said yesterday: “I am sorry for all of the hurt that I have caused. I dispute some of the allegations, but am not willing to comment on them in the newspaper.
“I have made many mistakes and I am finally facing up to them and trying to put things right.”