My father is a psychopath and will always be a danger to women. He’s pulled the wool over the eyes of the Parole Board but he’s not changed a bit...
RAPIST PC’S OWN DAUGHTER HITS OUT IN ANGER AT HIS EARLY RELEASE
A RAPIST police officer at the centre of a Parole Board release storm should never have been freed early – his own daughter said.
Stephen Mitchell was handed two life sentences after he preyed on women while on duty with Northumbria Police.
The trial judge warned that Mitchell, originally of Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, was a ruthless sexual predator who should never be released.
But the 50-year-old was freed after seven years.
Now, his own daughter Abbey, 22, has spoken about how her father terrorised her with violence growing up and bombarded her with phone calls from prison, saying chillingly: ‘You will always be my little girl.’
Abbey criticised the decision to let him out, believing he fooled parole chiefs into thinking he was a changed man by taking sewing and embroidery classes in jail.
She said: “My father is a psychopath and he will always be a danger to women.
“He’s pulled the wool over the eyes of the Parole Board, but he’s not changed a bit.”
Abbey was just a youngster when she discovered her father had raped and sexually abused vulnerable women, including heroin addicts and a disabled girl, after offering them help while they were in custody at Market Street police station in the centre of Newcastle.
He was given two life sentences at Newcastle Crown Court in 2011 after being found guilty of two rapes, three indecent assaults and misconduct.
He was told he would not be eligible for parole for at least seven and a half years, with the warning he might never be fit for freedom.
Abbey said: “I think he is a psychopath who feels no empathy but has learnt how to fake emotions to get people to do what he wants them to.
“He is calculating, manipulative and dangerous – he is now and I believe he always will be.
“He has managed to convince the Parole Board that somehow he is a changed man, but I just don’t believe that can be the case.
“Through the family I have been told he spent time in prison in groups doing needlework, embroidering cushions and making greeting cards.
“He would record voice messages telling me he loved me and that I would always be his little girl, but I saw through that.
“It wasn’t the voice of a loving father. It doesn’t matter how many cushions he has sewn, he has not changed.
“When I saw the photographs of him in the Sunday People I knew from that look in his eyes that he’s the same man he was.
“Nothing has changed, and that’s a very frightening thought.”
Abbey was aged around eight when her parents split because her mother could no longer tolerate Mitchell’s actions in the home.
She said Mitchell manipulated her into believing her mother no longer loved her.
It led to Abbey living with him for around six months, a period she now looks back on as a time of fear.
She said: “I know that I used to be a daddy’s girl and that we spent a lot of time together.
“When my mum and dad split he turned me against her. I now realise that she loved me and desperately wanted me to be with her and away from him.
“He told me she didn’t care, that she wanted nothing to do with me. I now realise the time that I had with him was not a normal relationship between a father and child.
“I remember him once in my bedroom becoming so angry that he punched a hole in the wall.
“On another occasion he was brushing my hair and because it
was thick it was pulling and I cried out.
“He hit my hand so hard with the hairbrush that it drew blood.
“Now I can see that incidents like that were about him controlling me just as he had to control everyone.
“He carried real menace that went much further than parental authority. The fear I was living in wasn’t clear to me until I went to stay with my mum.
“It was supposed to be for just one weekend but I never went back.”
Abbey refused to see her father but he continued to phone.
She said: “I didn’t trust anything he said and couldn’t feel comfortable around him.
“I think even as a child I had seen through him and had realised he was putting on an act.”
As a child Mitchell would take Abbey into the police station and let her sit in his patrol car.
But any pride she may once have felt in his career came crashing down at the age of 12.
Mitchell’s colleagues from Northumbria Police arrived at the family home to inform her mother he was being investigated over a series of rapes.
Abbey said: “I was devastated, disgusted and angry.
“I told my mum, ‘As far as I am concerned he is no longer my father.’ I don’t claim to speak for any of those women, I can’t begin to think what they suffered. My first response after being told he was being released so early was anger for them.”
Mitchell’s freedom was uncovered by the Sunday People who revealed exclusive pictures of the former police constable enjoying a carefree bike ride in Glasgow last week.
Fury over his release comes just months after the scandal of black cab rapist John Worboys, whose release was approved by the Parole Board but quashed by the High Court after protests from victims who never got to court.
Following the uproar, the board is now obliged to give an explanation of parole decisions. But the change in the law happened after Mitchell was freed last September.
Abbey said: “It’s frightening that he now has the freedom to go anywhere he wants and continue to lie and manipulate people.
“It’s the victims we should be focusing on and in particular how to make sure that people in positions of authority like he was are never able to abuse that power again.”
A Parole Board spokesman said: “A panel directed the release of Stephen Mitchell following an oral hearing in September 2017.
“Parole Board decisions are solely focused on whether a prisoner would represent a significant risk to the public.
“The panel will have carefully looked at a whole range of evidence, including details of the original evidence and any evidence of behaviour change.
“We do that with great care and public safety is our number one priority.”