My wife the classroom sex predator
She’s the teacher who’s escaped jail despite admitting ‘sexual activity’ with this 16-year-old pupil. Here, her ex-husband reveals he was just one of many young boys she was obsessed with
THEY say every picture tells a story, and the photograph of Helen Turnbull at the ‘school prom’ pretty much gives the plot away.
The teaching assistant is wearing a black skimpy outfit that shows her cleavage. Her face is covered in vampish make-up.
Her arm is wrapped protectively — possessively — around one of her pupils, a handsome teenager. The boy is 16. She is 34. And there is no mistaking the age gap.
This photograph, taken in June last year and which Turnbull posted on her Facebook page, was to spell the end of her marriage to her husband, Ben.
Had Ben not known what he already knew, he might just have persuaded himself that the picture was innocent. Here was a friendly, professional woman momentarily letting her hair down with her pupils at the end of a busy term.
But his wife had form for such behaviour. So there was no mistaking the fact that the photograph was anything but harmless.
On Thursday, Turnbull, now 35, walked free from court after she was cleared of three charges of sexual activity with the boy in the photograph, who is now 18.
She had, however, admitted kissing him and sending him very unteacher-like texts inquiring when they were going to have ‘power sex’ and asking what colour knickers to wear. But she’d denied his claims that their flirtation was consummated in the back of her Mini. The jury believed her.
She was still given a four- month prison sentence, suspended for two years, after she admitted one count of sexual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust, relating to the kiss and sexual text message. She was also told to sign the sexual offenders’ register for seven years, and has been barred from working with children. She will never work in a classroom again. What jurors were not told — after the judge ruled the evidence inadmissible — was that Turnbull’s husband had previously caught her kissing another teenager, sending flirtatious texts to yet another teen and is now in a relationship with a former pupil, Greg O’Neil, a boxer who is 23.
In an exclusive interview with the Mail, Ben, now divorced from her, reveals the full extent of his wife’s obsession with teenage boys, how she would wear see-through clothing to school in order to attract them and boast to her husband about the effect she was having on her young charges.
The impact on him and their two children, a boy aged 13 and a girl of five, has been devastating. His son attends the same Roman Catholic school where his mother worked and last week his father took him out of it because the bullying had become so bad.
Ben, a surveyor, has custody of the children, who live with him in a converted barn on his mother’s farm in a rural area outside Durham.
He is shell-shocked by the events of the past 16 months. ‘It’s unreal, really,’ he says. ‘Making pupils desire her became the entire focus of her life. I know the head called her in on at least two occasions to talk to her about the clothes she was wearing to work. She was annoyed — apparently an older teacher had complained about her. She would always comply, before going back to skimpy clothes.
‘But what I find hardest to forgive is that while she was running around chasing boys she wasn’t thinking about her own children.’
When Ben met his wife in a pub in Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear, in 2000, she had just completed a degree in politics and international law at Keele University, Staffs.
‘She was just really pretty and fun,’ recalls Ben, 38. ‘We had no responsibilities and used to go out a lot.
‘We’d been together for a year when she discovered she was pregnant with our son. It was a surprise but we were happy and in love and having a baby was a step we were ready to take.’
In 2003, Helen, who is from a devout Roman Catholic family, took on the post of teaching assistant at the school in Durham. The following year, she and Ben married in a Catholic ceremony at a local church and settled in the village of Haswell. Despite being married, she remained ‘Miss Robson’ which Ben now believes was to give the impression she was still single.
Just a year after their wedding, her attraction to teenage boys became evident. Ben and his brother, Jed, a 33-year- old teacher, had gone out together for the evening and returned home to find four boys in the house
‘I came home to find four teenage boys in the house’
with Helen. Their young son was being looked after by Helen’s parents.
Not only that, Helen was pressed into a corner of the kitchen in an uncompromising ‘clinch’ with one of them.
‘Helen didn’t hear me come in and I walked straight into the kitchen to see her pressed next to the washing machine with a boy around 17 years old.
‘They were holding each other and kissing. When the boy saw me he shot out the door and his friends quickly followed.
‘Helen and I had a massive row. I demanded to know what the boys were doing in the house and she said she’d been to the shop to buy a bottle of vodka — I used to worry about Helen’s drinking — and had come across the lads drinking by the war memorial.
‘The boys recognised her from school and after chatting to them she invited them back home with her.
‘I took off my wedding ring and at the time thought our marriage might be over but the next morning I came downstairs to find Helen on the sofa, crying.
‘She looked up and said: “Are we finished?”. I went for a walk to think about things and I came to the conclusion — I was not going to end our marriage over a kiss. We had a son, we’d been happy. I convinced myself it was a drunken mistake.’
But the following year, 2006, Ben was to see the beginnings of a pattern emerging when it became evident Helen had developed an infatuation for a boy at school.
‘She was harping on and on about this lad who was around 15 or 16 and I began to feel very uneasy. I could tell she was attracted to him.
‘One day I saw her coming out of the hairdresser’s and get into her car without noticing I was there. Through the window I could see she was texting someone and I saw the boy’s name, which was the name of this boy she couldn’t stop talking about.
‘I confronted her but she said she was texting one of her friends. I said, “you’ll lose your job over this” and drove straight round to her parents’ house, and told them what had been going on.
‘Her father had a long talk with her and in the end she agreed not to go to the school prom. If he hadn’t intervened, I feel certain she’d have started a sexual relationship with the boy.’
Around this time, Helen had also spoken in glowing terms about another pupil at the school — Greg O’Neil, who was then 16.
‘She had been doing small study sessions with Greg and a few other pupils. I remember she once told me Greg had stopped a fight and she sounded very proud.’
By now, says Ben, it was horribly clear that his wife’s key motivation at school was not to teach but to make the boys fall for her.
She had always taken care of her appearance but she began, says Ben, wearing provocative, wildly inappropriate outfits to work.
‘Every morning she would spend two hours getting ready,’ recalls Ben. ‘I remember one day she wore cream trousers and a cream top that were completely see-through and you could see her thong and bra.’
She revelled in the attention of her pupils, and far from hiding this from her husband, enjoyed boasting to him about the effect she had.
‘She would come home and talk about how she was turning the boys on. One boy grabbed her backside and was excluded for a week because of it. I could tell she was over the moon that he’d done it. On another occasion,
one of the boys had written “Miss Robson is phit [sic], Miss Robson is lush, I love Miss Robson”, on the blackboard.
‘She told me she kept it up there for the entire lesson. The idea of being lusted after by boys became more important to Helen than anything else.
‘She’s a good-looking woman. What boy wouldn’t be flattered by someone of her age and maturity flirting with them? I don’t blame them for being interested.
‘I was very worried. I begged her to give up this behaviour, but she wouldn’t listen. It felt like it was getting out of control and I didn’t know what to do. I just hoped it would stop, for the sake of our son.’
He says although they still had a love life, he felt his wife craved the attention and excitement of a single woman. ‘She always wanted to go out, while I wanted to spend time with our son.’
There was a return to normality when the couple’s daughter was born in 2009 and Helen was at home on maternity leave, but it was not to last.
Early last year, she became infatuated with yet another pupil, and their liaisons led to the eightday trial at Teeside Crown Court.
‘I was working away in London at the time,’ says Ben, ‘ and would spend Monday to Friday there before returning on a Friday evening. After a week away we were always keen to have sex, but that suddenly stopped. She was showing no interest in me.’
His wife was talking excitedly about the upcoming school prom on June 28, and Ben began to get a terrible sense of deja vu. ‘I had this dreadful feeling that it was happening all over again. She said she was thinking about staying at a hotel on the night of the prom. I pointed out that the prom was taking place a
‘She wore wildly inappropriate clothes in class’
ten-minute taxi ride from her house and she could easily get home.’
She didn’t stay in a hotel in the end and, to Ben’s relief, came home. But she didn’t join him in the marital bed. ‘She stayed up all night drinking and sitting at her computer on Facebook.’
The next day, the revealing photo of the boy was posted online, for all to see. It was clear to Ben his wife was dangerously obsessed with the boy.
A week later, Ben arrived home from work to find his wife dressed in a mini-skirt and top and announcing her intention to go out and stay at a hotel with some ‘girlfriends’.
‘Her skirt was so short you could see her thong when she walked. She said she was staying out with the girls but I was convinced she was meeting a man — or boy — for sex.
‘She didn’t stay out that night either, but when she came home we had a huge row.’
The marriage was collapsing around him. To try to find out what was going on, he looked up his wife’s Facebook profile and was stunned to see she’d taken down a picture of herself with her daughter and replaced it with the prom picture of her with the 16-year-old boy.
‘When I saw it I knew instantly there was something going on. I felt pretty sick. There was also a public reference to wearing an “itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikini” on a school trip to a water park. Taking down our little daughter’s picture and replacing it with the picture with him felt like an even greater betrayal than cheating on me. It was clear where her priorities were.’
Ben also found a second picture on his wife’s Facebook page of the two of them together, Helen wearing tight black leggings and vest top, cuddling him.
Ben confronted his wife and she left the house, with the children, the
‘When I saw the photo of them, I felt sick’
next day. After a protracted custody battle, the children returned to live with him last October.
After they separated, the boy began to ‘cool off’ and try to break with Helen. She began driving to his house in the mornings and parking nearby in the hope of seeing him.
The court was told how the boy’s father eventually angrily confronted Helen Turnbull in his street, and reported her to the police. She was arrested in September last year.
‘The police came round and told me about all the claims. I felt sick,’ says Ben, who was granted a divorce in February and who had to give evidence at the trial. ‘I didn’t even look at Helen. I want nothing to do with her. She’s lost the plot. People have suggested she has a split personality, and that may be true. When she wasn’t chasing boys, she was perfectly normal.
‘After the verdict, Helen phoned to speak to our son and asked him how his day at school had been. I thought: “He can’t go to school because of what you’ve done.”
‘He is old enough to know what his mother has done and he wants very little to do with her. It has been traumatic for our daughter because, at the end of the day, she’s her mother and she misses her.’
Ben is currently single and understandably wary of entering into another relationship.
Helen, meanwhile, is in a relationship with Greg O’Neil, whom she started seeing after her relationship with the boy stopped.
The pair had met originally during intimate study sessions, involving only three other pupils, before he left the school in 2007. He became a professional boxer in 2012.
‘I spoke to a friend about this the other day,’ says Ben, ‘ and he said something that cheered me up: “You’ll not find another like her, for sure.” ’