Farmer who lost two children kept others in ‘virtual prison’ for years
A WEALTHY farmer who suffered a breakdown after the death of two of his sons kept his remaining three children virtual prisoners in their own home, subjecting them to horrendous cruelty, a court has been told.
Derek Rawlinson, 80, inflicted years of sadistic punishment on his surviving two daughters and son, driving two of them almost to suicide. His breakdown came after his eldest son James, 12, died during an unsuccessful attempt to rescue his seven-year-old brother Peter from a pond on the family farm.
Manchester Crown Court heard that soon afterwards Rawlinson began beating his children. He kicked them in his steel-toe boots, fired a gun at one and forced another to touch an electric fence. Their mother, Maureen, a nurse, spanked them if they dared complain.
“The children were starved of any love or affection,” prosecutor Rob Hall told the court. “Rawlinson would tell his daughters that he wished they had drowned instead of James and Peter.”
Rawlinson regularly threatened to kill them and bury them in the garden if they misbehaved. Two were so terrified they took rat poison in an attempt to kill themselves.
At their £350,000 farmhouse near Saddleworth Moor, Greater Manchester, Rawlinson once fired a shotgun into furniture where his daughter was cowering. When she was given another beating, her parents stitched a wound themselves using a bent needle.
The younger daughter, then eight, had her only doll thrown out of a bedroom window and had to watch it rot in the rain. When the children were caught smuggling food they were forced to eat raw eggs, had their furniture burned and floorboards ripped up.
Rawlinson’s surviving son Michael was so haunted by his ordeal he became a drug addict and was stabbed to death in 1999, aged 36, in a bungled drug deal. The court heard the police were called years after the offences when a relative learned of the abuse from the sisters.
Rawlinson, from Littleborough, near Rochdale, was jailed for four years after admitting child cruelty and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. His wife, now 76, admitted child cruelty and was given a 21-month sentence, suspended for two years.