My little girl ached to be back with the monster who’d taken her
The full devastating fall-out for the mother whose 15-year-old ran off to France with her teacher
IT WAS a case that horrified Britain: a schoolgirl who ran off to France with her married maths teacher. Now, in a new book, her mother shares their full shattering story. On Saturday, in our first extract, she told of the devastating day her daughter went missing and how she was tracked down by police. Today, she reveals their troubles were far from over.
SUDDENLY, my 15-year-old daughter Gemma was standing right in front of me at Gatwick. She dropped her bag and flung her arms around me; we both cried as we held each other tightly.
Her long brown hair was now a strange orange colour — the result of an ineffective attempt at disguise. And she was wearing over-large garments, as the police had taken her own clothes for DNA testing.
It was just over a week since Gemma had been abducted and taken to France by her 30-year-old married maths teacher, Jeremy Forrest. She felt like a bag of bones and smelled unfamiliar.
I had a hundred unanswered questions, but I knew she’d need time to process everything that had happened. The important thing was that I had my precious daughter back.
That night, she talked and talked until the early hours of the morning.
At last I could begin to piece together the chain of events. On the night of the abduction, she’d arranged to stay overnight with her best friend, Louise, then told her that she wasn’t feeling well and had to go home.
Instead, Gemma had gone to a shopping centre car park, where Forrest was waiting for her.
The first she knew about their destination was when she and Forrest were in the car on the way to the ferryport in Dover. It was then Gemma began to realise the magnitude of what she was doing.
She’d run away from home because the net was closing in: the police had her phone and she knew they’d find the photos she’d deleted — showing her teacher naked from the waist up, with his hand down his underpants.
Feeling scared, she didn’t speak to Forrest for the rest of the journey. Before the ferry crossing, he asked her to send a text to her other close friend, Ben, saying that they were heading north. Oh, he had it all sussed out.
Knowing the police would soon be on
Gemma insisted that he really loved her
his tail, he chucked his phone into the sea and dumped his car in Paris. From there, they caught a train to Bordeaux.
The plan was to lay low in France until her 16th birthday, then return together to the UK.
To that end, he’d created a fake CV, and applied for a job working in a bar in Bordeaux. Unfortunately for him, the bar manageress was British and had read about Gemma’s case online. After contacting the police, she invited him back for a second interview.
As Gemma and Forrest were walking towards the bar, they were intercepted by plainclothes policemen. My daughter, however, thought she was being kidnapped, so she started kicking and screaming.
It wasn’t until a detective inspector called out to her in English that she began to calm down. The experience of being seized by strangers dressed in black was so traumatic, however, it gave her nightmares.
After her return, I was relieved to hear her bantering again with her siblings, who were taking the mickey out of her hair colour. In another sense, though, everything had changed.
Forrest loved her, she told me, and she missed him terribly. They should — and would — be back together, she insisted. I wanted to scream: ‘ Don’t you realise what a monster he is?’ But I knew I had to tread carefully, so I tried to react as if she were talking about an ordinary boyfriend.
He was nothing of the kind, of course; she was 14 when they began their relationship and he’d been her teacher, with a duty of responsibility. Not only had he broken the law, he’d destroyed her childhood. Gemma kept saying: ‘He’s not like that. If you knew him, you’d understand.’ And, bit by bit, she began to tell me how their relationship had developed.
They’d got to know each other through after-school clubs, she said, and then increasingly spent time together.
Her friends Louise and Ben — caught up in the romance of it all — would often provide alibis for the two of them to meet. I don’t blame Louise and Ben: they were good-natured kids from good homes who got swept up in the conspiracy.
In effect, Forrest had seduced them as well as my daughter. When I dropped Gemma at Louise’s house for a sleepover, for example, she’d be picked up five minutes later by him. There were hotels. Overnight stays.
Naturally, now that she was back, Gemma desperately wanted to discuss everything with her best friend. Louise’s father, however, would only allow the girls to see each other if they had supervised visits. We tried to make this work, but it was just too awkward.
To Gemma, it seemed that within the space of a few days, she’d lost her boyfriend and her best friend. And instead of going back to school, she had seven hours of police interviews.
As the weeks went by, we both came under increasing strain. Total strangers would stop to peer in through our windows. It was as if we were Fred and Rose West — people were taking a
day trip to see the freaky family. I became obsessed with what everyone was saying about me on social media and I’d read their comments long into the night. some were very hurtful, feeding into my paranoia about being a bad mother.
I had nightmares about Forrest escaping to get gemma. I saw him dragging her through the front door, his hand over her mouth. Then I’d wake up in a hot sweat and have to double-check that the front door was locked.
It got to the stage where I was afraid to sleep. Exhausted, I wandered around in a daze. I simply couldn’t bear the idea of that man laying his hands on my daughter again.
Meanwhile, gemma was changing. There were no further talks like the one on her first night back; she became closed-up and barely spoke.
One day, after we’d been home for a few weeks, I asked my partner, Paul, to drive me to the village of Ringmer, East sussex, where Forrest lived. I knew he’d also taken gemma there.
I’d been hoping the place would be seedy, but it had a lovely village green, little shops and country pubs. A real gem. We parked outside Forrest’s home and stared at it. It was a nice house — he’d obviously been very comfortable financially. But the windows were papered over, presumably by his wife, Emily, who’d moved away.
seeing his house wasn’t enough, though. I thirsted to know every detail about him — what he did in prison, how he’d become a teacher, what each of his ex-girlfriends was like.
Who was this monster who’d come into our lives and ripped our world apart? It became almost an addiction to find out everything I could.
I also became more suspicious about male teachers in general, grilling my 11-year-old daughter, Maddie, about hers. I genuinely feared the same thing happening to her.
By now, gemma was desperate to visit Forrest, who was held on remand. I had to tell her this was out of the question because she was his victim.
How she hated that word. still under the illusion that she was part of a romantic love story, she wrote to him in jail — but the authorities intercepted her letters.
I tried to reason with her, but the fact that Forrest had left his wife and his entire life in England — all for her sake — seemed to mean everything.
The only chink in her armour was that she’d now accepted that Forrest had lied to her about no longer having sex with his wife. If she’d known that, she told the police, she’d never have become involved with him.
Having decided she’d return to her school over my dead body, I enrolled her with Fless — the Flexible Learning Educational support service. This is a stepping-stone for secondary school children who’ve spent time out of school, and it turned out to be a boon.
But for gemma, it also meant a onehour round-trip and having to make new friends.
At home, she seemed more vulnerable than ever. she’d answer my questions as if reading from an autocue. In front of others, she was her usual self, but behind closed doors she was turning into someone I didn’t recognise. A child who’d been groomed by a sex offender.
The next blow was that Forrest decided to plead not guilty in January, 2013. My heart sank. There would now have to be a trial — and gemma would need to give evidence in court. When I told gemma, she burst into tears. Angry and confused, she was adamant she wouldn’t go to court. Worse, she begged me to tell the police I’d given Forrest permission to take her away.
I confess that I briefly considered giving in, simply because she’d then have been spared the heartache of a trial. But it would have been a lie and I could have ended up in prison myself. Besides, I craved for justice.
In April 2013, my maternity leave ended and I went back to my job, auditing stock in stores all over the south of England. My first day back coincided with a meeting in the Midlands, with an overnight stay.
When I came home, gemma bit my head off. I said: ‘Is everything OK?’ and she replied: ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ I snapped back: ‘Don’t talk to me like that!’
she stormed upstairs, saying: ‘ I’m sick to death of this, I’m sick to death of you!’ Then she came down with her bags packed and announced she was going to stay with her stepfather — my ex-husband, Max.
I’d been siding with the police and social workers, she claimed, and hadn’t been telling her everything.
What she meant, of course, was that I wasn’t telling her what she wanted to hear. she wanted me to say that everything would turn out all right and she’d soon be back with Forrest.
The way she saw it, I was just against her the whole time — and she hated me for it. I’d lost her, and there was nothing I could do about it. Some names have been changed
for legal reasons. EXTRACTED from The Runaway Schoolgirl by Davina Williams, published by John Blake on February 5 at £16.99 © Davina Williams 2015. To order a copy at the special price of £14.44 (valid until March 7, 2015), visit mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P is free for a limited time only.
‘I’m sick to death of you,’ she screamed